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There is little more important than stopping and the reversing the growth of the federal government. We have been blessed by the present administration. It is so bad, for the next 50 years we can bring out Obama to scare the kids. The question now is whether we will able to reverse course and get the government out of our lives. All the candidates so far can only be expected to slow the growth. Paul Ryan looks to be one who can do the heavy lifting of turning it back. So, any hints he may get in the 2012 race will be well received here. Stephen Hayes writes on why he thinks Paul Ryan is going to run.

… Perhaps more telling was Ryan’s request not to serve on the debt supercommittee created by the recent deal on the debt ceiling. Ryan has become driver of policy in the Republican Party, with a focus on debt and deficits. And virtually everyone assumed he would have a seat on the committee. But Ryan went to House speaker John Boehner and specifically requested to be left off of the panel. In his public statements, Ryan said he needed time to work on budget reform in the House. While there’s little doubt that Ryan is keen to work on reforming a badly broken budget process, a source close to the Wisconsin congressman says he asked to remain off the supercommittee in order to preserve the option of a presidential run. The same source says that Boehner encouraged Ryan to run.

In his interview Friday with Charlie Sykes, Ryan argued that the supercommittee is not the place to debate debt and deficits – the 2012 campaign is. “The reason I don’t think it’s going to get us another grand bargain – or should – is we should not have a system where 12 politicians cut some agreement in a back room that restructures the whole design of the federal government in three months time. This is a decision that should be brought to the American people.” He added: “I think we need to have a discussion and a debate about how we’re going to deal with this debt crisis because that will determine the kind of country we are going to be and the kind of country we are going to be for a long, long time.”

That’s the kind of debate that would take place during a presidential race, of course. Ryan does not see anyone in the current Republican field who is making such a debate the center of his or her presidential campaign. Perhaps not surprisingly, Ryan disagrees with the conventional wisdom that the entitlement reform proposals in his budget plan are poison to Republican candidates across the country. He points to the results of the recalls in Wisconsin last week, where the battles centered on Ryan’s plans for retooling Medicare as much as Scott Walker’s successful and increasingly less controversial budget reforms, as “vindication” for the solutions that House Republicans have put before the American people. …

Jennifer Rubin on why Ryan should run.

… There is another reason for Ryan to run, of course. The current GOP field is, even with the addition of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, uninspiring to many. Who is the guy to go toe-to-toe with Obama and make the conservative case against him in a way that is compelling to the general electorate? The pro-Ryan contingent just doesn’t see anyone. Although the push for a Ryan run preceded by months the entry of Perry into the race, Perry’s comments on Bernanke and Perry’s Texas persona have only heightened fears that he won’t be able to win back the White House for the GOP.

A Republican think-tanker who previously worked in the White House has been among those urging Ryan to run. I asked him why he’s so certain that Ryan is the right man. He replied that it is more than the conviction that Ryan would be a good president. He explained that “this is a match between the man and the moment. What I mean by that is that we’re in a particularly perilous situation economically. In most instances, what we hope for in a president is someone who is capable of making wise and informed decisions that lead to economic growth. Competence and good judgment are enough. But if we are in a period of unusual hardship and unusual challenges — which I believe to be the case — then we need to find someone of unusual gifts and talents.” He adds, “The one public figure who is comparable to Paul when it comes to this skill set is Governor Mitch Daniels. But his decision not to enter the race means we’re now down to one. And Ryan is the one. It’s true that he’s young, that he has no executive experience, and that the hour is growing late. But not too late. The stars, I think, are aligning his way. And now is his time.” …

You can’t make it up! The Buses for the Tour of The One are made in Canada. Ed Morrissey has the story.

The legendary Casey Stengel once lamented about his hapless expansion-season New York Mets, “Can’t anyone here play this game?”  Two stories this week prompt the same question about Barack Obama and his political team.  First, Obama spent $2.2 million in taxpayer money to buy specially-made buses for a three-state tour about jobs — without actually having a plan to flog.  At least the $2.2 million puts some Americans to work, right?  Well … North Americans, maybe:

“President Obama is barnstorming the heartland to boost US jobs in a taxpayer-financed luxury bus the government had custom built — in Canada, The Post has learned.

The $1.1 million vehicle, one of two that Quebec-based Prevost sold the government, has been tricked out by the Secret Service with state-of-the-art security features and creature comforts.

It’s a VIP H3-45 model, the company’s top of the line, and is used by major traveling rock bands.

“That’s the more luxurious model,” Christine Garant of Prevost told The Post.”

Barack Obama — rock star.  Yes, that’s exactly the kind of image that wins votes in the upper Midwest.  That’s bad enough, but buying two buses from a Canadian company while promising to create jobs in the US is the worst kind of optics imaginable.  Why not use a manufacturer based in the US?  I’m certain that Complete Coach Works in California could use the work, for instance, or North American Bus Industries in Alabama.  Setra USA manufactures its buses in Greensboro, North Carolina, a key state that Obama could easily lose in 2012.  Wouldn’t a $2.2 million buy there have turned a few heads?  For that matter, Obama could have bought them from Motor Coach Industries and picked them up in his home state of Illinois at the start of his tour. …

Michael Barone writes in the Journal about the Midwest economic model that would run the world.

… The Big Three auto companies, economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, could create endless demand for their products through manipulative advertising and planned obsolescence. The United Auto Workers would ensure that productivity gains would be shared by workers and the assembly line would never be speeded up. In those days, 40% of Michigan voters lived in union (mostly UAW) households, the base vote of a liberal Democratic Party that pushed for ever larger governments at the local, state and federal levels. You found similar alignments in most Midwestern states.

Liberals assumed the Michigan model was the wave of the future, and that in time—once someone built big factories and unions organized them—backward states like Texas would catch up. Texas liberal writers Ronnie Dugger and Molly Ivins kept looking for the liberal coalition of blacks, poor whites and Latinos that political scientist V.O. Key predicted in his 1940s classic “Southern Politics.”

History hasn’t worked out that way. In 1970, Michigan had nine million people. In 2010, it had 10 million. In 1970, Texas had 11 million people. In 2010, it had 25 million. In 1970, Detroit was the nation’s fifth-largest metro area. Today, metro Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex are both pressing the San Francisco Bay area for the No. 4 spot, and Detroit is far behind. …

Tony Blankley warns about the liberals’ authoritarian temptation.

… Make no mistake: If our form of government is “broken,” democracy’s critics would “fix” it by castration. In our case, they would castrate the “representative” bit. We have seen this argument before in our history. Put forward by authoritarians and their supporters, it disdains the messy and disorderly process whereby free people thrash out the nation’s decisions.

The current recrudescence of this authoritarian temptation did not start with the debt-ceiling fight. It’s been building for a couple of years. It comes – as it always does – at a moment when the nation faces serious economic or security dangers. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in September 2009 gave early voice to the current authoritarian temptation: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

Abraham Lincoln could have been thinking of Thomas Friedman when he worried out loud in the Gettysburg Address whether any nation “conceived in liberty … could long endure.” Lincoln then called the nation to the “unfinished work” of maintaining a nation “of the people, by the people and for the people.” That work goes on today. …

More proof God has a sense of humor. This time from KOMO TV in Seattle. Seems the ‘green jobs” program there is a bust. Someone in the article sounds like a character from the movie Sixteen Candles. (Think Long Duk Dong)

Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.

McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.

But more than a year later, Seattle’s numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable. …

… “People are frustrated and rightly so,” Curtis said. “There’s been sort of a lag time when people graduated from those programs.”

They include Long Duong, 32, who got a certificate in sealing air leaks and insulating walls after he was laid off from a job handling bags at the airport. But he soon found that other men had more qualifications than him, and he took part-time gigs – installing light bulbs and canvassing doors – while waiting for work.

A year later, he’s still looking. …

Three Thousand miles away in Massachusetts, we see politicians who are just as stupid. Boston Herald has the story of the “green company” that filed for bankruptcy protection.

Evergreen Solar Inc., the Massachusetts clean-energy company that received millions in state subsidies from the Patrick administration for an ill-fated Bay State factory, has filed for bankruptcy, listing $485.6 million in debt.

Evergreen, which closed its taxpayer-supported Devens factory in March and cut 800 jobs, has been trying to rework its debt for months. The cash-strapped company announced today has sought a reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware and reached a deal with certain note holders to restructure its debt and auction off assets.

The Massachusetts Republican Party called the Patrick administration’s $58 million financial aid package, which supported Evergreen’s $450 million factory, a “waste” of money. …

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James Pethokoukis notes some Paul Ryan moves in Iowa and wonders if he will get in the race.

… the current field still seems unsettled enough that Ryan probably yet has a window to jump into the race. Betting markets, for instance, have Mitt Romney and Rick Perry more or less tied at 33 percent. I would imagine Ryan, currently at 1 percent, would be running roughly even with those guys the day after he announces … if he announces, which I still doubt he will. But if Rick Perry can get into the GOP race in mid-August and be seen as viable, Ryan could certainly wait until September.

And Bill Kristol is almost wistful in his interest in another candidate.

… So history suggests a Romney-Perry showdown for the nomination. The legacy candidate vs. the big state candidate. And the polls have the two of them as the frontrunners.

Should Republicans yield to history, and resign themselves to a Romney-Perry choice? They could do worse. And it’s true that all experience has shown that Republicans are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Or, here in the 21st century, is it Republicans’ right, and their duty, to throw off such precedent, and to welcome new champions for our future security and prosperity?

But they can only be welcomed if they step forward.

Jonathan Tobin in Contentions says as far an another candidate is concerned, fagedaboutit!

… Though it is theoretically possible for someone like Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio or Chris Christie (the trio of GOP heavy hitters who the Journal and likeminded conservatives still wish would run for president) to still get in, at this point it would be difficult if not impossible to do so successfully. And that is leaving aside the fact none of those three seem to want to run.

The time for dreaming about the perfect candidate is over. Even if such a person existed, they aren’t running. Bachmann, Perry and Romney all have drawbacks that might, under other circumstances, make it hard to imagine them being nominated, let alone elected president. Yet one of them will be nominated next year, and that person will, depending on the state of the economy, have a good chance of taking the oath in January 2013. Conservatives have a tough choice to make in the coming months. But choose they must.

Nile Gardiner notes the presidential approval ratings of 39% are the lowest since Jimmy Carter.

Strikingly, Barack Obama has achieved the lowest ratings for any US president at this stage of his first term in office for 32 years, since 1979, according to polling data provided by the Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center. To place Obama’s ratings in historical context, at the same stage of their first term (or only term in the case of Bush Snr.), George W. Bush had a 60 percent approval rating (August 2003), Bill Clinton had 46 percent approval (August 1995), George H.W. Bush 71 percent (August 1991), and Ronald Reagan 43 percent (August 1983).

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor calls out attention to yet another series of unintended consequences.

Michael Giberson at Knowledge Problem has an excellent post that illustrates perfectly three fundamental problems with the metastasizing regulatory state.   EPA rules on air toxins and mercury are going to force–or at least accelerate–the closure of large numbers of coal-fired power plants especially in the East and Midwest.

Problem One: making uncoordinated policy decisions that have myriad impacts in tightly connected systems.  The EPA decision focuses on one thing: air quality.  But its chosen remedy has the potential to cause major disruptions in areas outside of EPA jurisdiction, considerations that EPA did not take sufficiently into consideration.  Specifically, the loss of such large quantities of baseload generation threatens electricity supply, and electricity reliability.  The stability of the grid depends crucially on the spatial configuration of load and generation; those have to be balanced tightly in order to ensure reliability.  Shutting down just one plant can upset that delicate balance in a way that greatly increases the system’s vulnerability.  So in its zeal to do good, EPA has created a huge potential for bad. …

Here’s that blog post from Knowledge Problem.

Even an article in the New York Times is characterizing the spate of EPA regulations, recently issued or coming shortly, affecting the electric power industry as a “cascade.” Regional power grid operators have been reviewing their reliability projections and becoming alarmed. Here’s Matthew Wald in the Times:

“WASHINGTON — As 58 million people across 13 states sweated through the third day of a heat wave last month, power demand in North America’s largest regional grid jurisdiction hit a record high. And yet there was no shortage, no rolling blackout and no brownout in an area that stretches from Maryland to Chicago.

But that may not be the case in the future as stricter air quality rules are put in place. Eastern utilities satisfied demand that day — July 21 — with hefty output from dozens of 1950s and 1960s coal-burning power plants that dump prodigious amounts of acid gases, soot, mercury and arsenic into the air. Because of new Environmental Protection Agencyrules, and some yet to be written, many of those plants are expected to close in coming years.

No one is sure yet how many or which ones will be shuttered or what the total lost output would be. And there is little agreement over how peak demand will be met in future summers. …

Kevin Williamson in National Review’s Exchequer blog does a number on the many lies of Paul Krugman and the NY Times.

Paul Krugman continues his campaign to discredit the economic success of Texas, and, as usual, he is none too particular about the facts. …

Other liberals are jumping on the trash Texas bandwagon and they are just as foolish as Krugman. Beltway Confidential has some examples.

But the silliest criticism of the Texas job record has to go to Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, who explored Perry’s line that “Since June of 2009, Texas is responsible for more than 40 percent of all of the new jobs created in America.”

Kessler notes the following:

“This is a great-sounding statistic, and likely will form the core of Perry’s campaign against a presidency that thus far has negative job creation.

But, as always, there needs to be some context. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has especially promoted this figure, and even it acknowledges that the number comes out differently depending on whether one compares Texas to all states or just to states that are adding jobs. Since Texas is adding jobs, and many other states are losing jobs, Texas’s gains become out-sized in a general national survey.”                       

So Texas’s job gains look better because lots of states have lost jobs. And this is supposed to be a criticism?

Andrew Malcolm has the best of late-night humor.

Leno: President Obama is off on his three-state bus tour this week. I believe the three states are Confusion, Delusion and Desperation.

Fallon: Obama took some campaign volunteers out for burgers the otherday and apparently he left a 35% tip. Oh man, that guy is SO generous… with China’s money.

Leno: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will stay on with President Obama and not join the private sector. Thanks to his economic policies there are no private sector jobs.

Leno: More fallout from that Standard & Poor’s credit downgrading of the U.S.. Today England, France and Germany unfriended us on Facebook.

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Time to cover the riots in the United Kingdom. Mark Steyn is first with his observations.

… This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want” to be accomplished by “co-operation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life’s vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays and Muslims. From page 204: “For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.”

I believe it is regarded as a sign of insanity to start quoting oneself, but at the risk of trying your patience I’ll try one more, because it’s the link between America’s downgraded debt and Britain’s downgraded citizenry:

“The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people.”

Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the Earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. When you’re imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.

There are lessons for all of us there.

Nile Gardiner from Telegraph Blogs.

I just watched this truly heart breaking interview on BBC online from Tuesday with a devastated young shop owner, Liz Pilgrim, whose business in Ealing, west London, was looted by what she described as “feral rats”, who took whatever they wanted with impunity. She made an impassioned appeal for the army to be brought on the streets to restore law and order, and I’m sure millions of Britons would have agreed with every word she said.

What took place this week in many of Britain’s biggest cities was nothing short of pure barbarism, carried out by evil thugs who have zero respect for private property, the rule of law, common decency, and in many instances human life. These feral looters deserve to spend years behind bars, and the prime minister has promised that these rioters would “pay for what they have done”. They do not deserve an ounce of sympathy or mercy from the courts, regardless of whatever background they are from. The only lesson these brutal thugs understand is the heavy hand of the law, and severe punishment for their crimes. …

Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal.

… The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor—quite likely—any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked. …

Has the president changed? Norman Podhoretz says nope. He’s the same leftist product of the country’s intellectually bankrupt academic community that he’s always been.

… Mr. Obama was a genuine product of the political culture that had its birth among a marginal group of leftists in the early 1960s and that by the end of the decade had spread metastatically to the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, and the entertainment industry. Like their communist ancestors of the 1930s, the leftist radicals of the ’60s were convinced that the United States was so rotten that only a revolution could save it.

But whereas the communists had in their delusional vision of the Soviet Union a model of the kind of society that would replace the one they were bent on destroying, the new leftists only knew what they were against: America, or Amerika as they spelled it to suggest its kinship to Nazi Germany. Thanks, however, to the unmasking of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian nightmare, they did not know what they were for. Yet once they had pulled off the incredible feat of taking over the Democratic Party behind the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972, they dropped the vain hope of a revolution, and in the social-democratic system most fully developed in Sweden they found an alternative to American capitalism that had a realistic possibility of being achieved through gradual political reform.

Despite Mr. McGovern’s defeat by Richard Nixon in a landslide, the leftists remained a powerful force within the Democratic Party, but for the next three decades the electoral exigencies within which they had chosen to operate prevented them from getting their own man nominated. Thus, not one of the six Democratic presidential candidates who followed Mr. McGovern came out of the party’s left wing, and when Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (the only two of the six who won) tried each in his own way to govern in its spirit, their policies were rejected by the American immune system. It was only with the advent of Barack Obama that the leftists at long last succeeded in nominating one of their own. …

Peter Schiff is unhappy with the Fed’s low interest rate announcement.

… This reckless policy, designed to facilitate government spending and appease Wall Street financiers, will continue to starve Main Street of the capital it needs to make real productivity-enhancing investments. American investment capital will continue to flow abroad, denying local business the means to expand and hire. It also destroys interest rates paid to holders of bank savings deposits which traditionally had been a financial pillar of retirees. In addition, such an inflationary policy drives real wages lower, robbing Americans of their purchasing power. The consequence is a dollar in free-fall, dragging down with it the standard of living of average Americans.

Until interest rates are allowed to rise to appropriate levels, more resources will be misallocated, additional jobs will be lost, government spending and deficits will continue to grow, the dollar will keep falling, consumer prices will keep rising, and the government will keep blaming our problems on external factors beyond its control. As the old adage goes, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” …

Reader’s Digest has figured out the higher education bubble.

If you’re the parent of a high-achieving high school student prepared to spend whatever it takes to send your kid to an Ivy League college, authors Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker have some unlikely advice: Don’t do it.

Dreifus, a New York Times writer and an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and Hacker, a veteran political science professor at Queens College in New York, spent three years interviewing faculty, students, and administrators and crunching statistics for their book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It. Their finding? That many of America’s colleges and universities — especially the elite — aren’t worth their tuition and serve faculty over their undergrads.

More outrageous, they say, is that tuition nationwide has jumped at more than twice the rate of inflation since 1982, so many kids graduate deeply in debt. “Tuition is probably the second-largest item you’ll buy in your lifetime, after your home,” Dreifus says. Given that, the authors suggest you consider the following as you bear down on the decision of where your child will spend the next four (or more) years. …

NewsBiscuit found the real downside to the UK riots.

Senior looters have returned early from their summer riots to apologise to local communities across England for unleashing a wave of visits by annoying, insincere politicians. …

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The LA Times has a story from Warsaw that took place at the start of World War II.

She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name.

She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper.

Natalie Yazinska.

Her mother, Sima, sobbed.

“The little one must make it,” Leon Weinstein told his wife. “We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive.”

He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: “I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this.”

A cold wind cut at the skin that December morning, so Leon Weinstein bundled Natalie, 18 months old, in heavy pants and a thick wool sweater. He headed for a nearby apartment, the home of a lawyer and his wife. The couple did not have a child. Weinstein hoped they wanted one.

He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us. …

Back to our time as the IBD editors celebrate the win over Wisconsin’s modern day Nazis. Think that is too strong? They don’t like secret ballots. They intimidate people by showing up at their homes. They occupy buildings in defiance of the law. etc. etc. …

Unions’ failure to recall four Republican state senators shows that their days of power through intimidation are over. If this was a rehearsal for 2012, the White House should start making other plans.

The natives are still restless, the pitchforks sharp and the Walker revolution safe. Portrayed by union leaders as an aberration fueled by a generic voter wrath against incumbents, the GOP grab of both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature and the governor’s office in 2010 was predicted to fade once voters realized “workers’ rights” were at risk.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the polling booth, that shrine to the secret ballot so anathema to union leaders. Voters decided they liked a limited government that said there are things we just can’t afford. They also liked the idea that taxpayers had rights and could and should control how their money is spent.

It didn’t help the union cause when the city of Milwaukee announced it will save at least $25 million a year — and potentially as much as $36 million in 2012 — from health care benefit changes it didn’t have to negotiate with unions, as a result of provisions in a 2009-11 budget-repair measure that ended most collective bargaining for public-sector unions. …

Charles Krauthammer says forget the left’s claim that DC is broken. The system is working.

Of all the endlessly repeated conventional wisdom in today’s Washington, the most lazy, stupid, and ubiquitous is that our politics is broken. On the contrary. Our political system is working well (I make no such claims for our economy), indeed, precisely as designed — profound changes in popular will translated into law that alters the nation’s political direction.

The process has been messy, loud, disputatious, and often rancorous. So what? In the end, the system works. Exhibit A is Wisconsin. Exhibit B is Washington itself.

The story begins in 2008. The country, having lost confidence in Republican governance, gives the Democrats full control of Washington. The new president, deciding not to waste a crisis, attempts a major change in the nation’s ideological trajectory. Hence his two signature pieces of legislation: a near–$1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in galactic history; and a health-care reform that places one-sixth of the economy under federal control.

In a country where conservatives outnumber liberals 2–1, this causes a reaction. …

Want to know more about Rick Perry? Toby Harnden traveled to West Texas to check our the origins of the GOP’s latest candidate.

So I decided to follow Paul Burka’s advice (See Pickings – July 28) and head down to Paint Creek, Texas, where Governor Rick Perry – due to announce his White House run on Saturday – grew up. It was an absolutely fascinating trip to West Texas (the 108-degree heat notwithstanding) and my news feature for the Telegraph can be found here.

Before George W. Bush was elected president, I made a similar journey to Midland, also in West Texas, where the then Lone State governor had spent his youth (the resultant post-election piece is still on the interweb here). But Bush, of course, was a scion of a patrician New England clan and was educated at Andover and Yale while Perry is Texas and Paint Creek through and through.

Despite the superficial similarities between the two (cowboy boots and a certain Texas braggadocio) the two men (who are said to have frosty relations) are very different.

But if the contrasts between Perry and Bush are strong, just think of those between Perry and Obama – you could not get two more dissimilar American life stories.

Harnden shares more of what he learned in West Texas.

… “There were three things to do in Paint Creek: school, church, and Boy Scouts,” Mr Perry said last year, looking back on the late 1950s. “That’s it. And it was plenty.” Paint Creek was “one of the most beautiful places or it could be one of the most desolate” depending on the weather. As a child, he ventured, it was the home of “some of the most principled, disciplined people in the world, and faithful”. 

Back in the late 1950s, he was known as Ricky Perry, a mischievous boy, always smiling, who lived with his parents and older sister Milla in a rented wooden house that lacked indoor plumbing. He wore a cowboy shirt hand sewn by his mother, a locally renowned quilter, and his highest ambition seemed to be to become an Eagle Scout.

Now 61 and governor of Texas since 2000, Mr Perry is the longest-serving chief executive of the state in its history and a man who has held elected office for almost 27 years. This weekend, he is expected to announce a bid for the American presidency, an office that until recently he had steadfastly maintained held no attraction for him.

Thus far, Mr Perry’s life has been characterised by uncanny good fortune and an ability to seize an opportunity and capitalise on it.

He left the Democratic Party in 1989 to run as a Republican against a prominent liberal who was the strong favourite to keep his post as Texas Agriculture Commissioner.

In 2000, he was a little-known lieutenant governor who was automatically elevated to the state’s top post when George W. Bush won the presidency. …

Democracy in America Blog has a bit on Perry.

… Can he win? I think he has a very good chance. In my view, he is a shrewd politician and not as much of a far-right ideologue as people tend to think. I’ve elaborated on that here, and gathered some of my recent takes on Mr Perry here. Our Lexington columnist also took a look at the governor last month, and concluded that a Perry-Obama general election “would offer an invigorating choice between different visions of America’s future.” I think that’s right. We’ll see how it goes. For now, I’ll just say that rivals who misunderestimate him do so at their peril.

James Pethokoukis has more.

Congratulations to Michele Bachmann, but the big political winner Saturday wasn’t in Ames, Iowa. That politician was half a country away in South Carolina, completely scrambling the Republican presidential race.

1) Online betting markets have already decided that Texas Gov. Rick Perry is no flash in the Panhandle — another Fred Thompson or Wesley Clark who sparks a flurry of interest but quickly fades. To bettors, it’s a two-horse race and a dead heat between Perry and Mitt Romney. But anyone listening to Perry’s well delivered, muscular, high-energy speech in Charleston, S.C., would probably draw the same political conclusion. He hit tea party-friendly themes and hit them well:

“The change we seek will never emanate out of Washington…it must come from the windswept prairies of Middle America…the farms and factories across this great land…the hearts and minds of God-fearing Americans who will not accept a future that is less than our past…who will not be consigned a fate of less freedom in exchange for more government. … And I will work every day to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your lives as I can.” …

… Assuming no other heavy hitters join the race. Perry-Romney is shaping up to be an epic brawl between two aggressive candidates with impressive resumes, both able to raise boats loads of campaign cash. Let the Austin-Boston battle begin.

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Ed Morrissey gives us the good news from Wisconsin.

… For the second time, unions had an opportunity to bring their organizational and funding advantages into a special election environment, and for the second time, Wisconsin voters largely rejected them.  The union tried to unseat Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser in April, blanketing the state for challenger Joann Kloppenburg in an election that should have had a small, easily manipulated turnout.  Instead, they came up empty as Wisconsin voters turned out heavily.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza calls this “an undeniable defeat for labor and progressive activists”: …

David Harsanyi celebrates the fall of the cult of Obama.

… The sight of a crumbling Cult of Obama — and with it the end of the progressive presidency — has many on the left so frustrated that they simply dismiss the very idea of ideological debate. To challenge the morality and rationality of Obamanomics only means you’re bought, too stupid to know any better or, most likely, both. A slack-jawed hostage-taking saboteur.

Armed with this unearned intellectual and ethical superiority, it is not surprising to hear someone like John Kerry reprimand the media for even covering conservative viewpoints. It is predictable that the Senate would “investigate” a private entity like Standard & Poor’s for giving an opinion on American debt that conflicted with its own. (Remember when not listening to the Dixie Chicks was a “chilling of free speech”?)

Obama himself blamed the volatile stock market on the “prolonged debate over the debt ceiling … where the threat of default was used as a bargaining chip.” So it’s not the job-killing policy or another $4 trillion of debt in two years that’s problematic; it‘s the insistence of elected officials to represent their constituents that’s really killing America.

Following the lead of the Environmental Protection Agency, Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently used this imagined “dysfunction” as an excuse to try to unilaterally implement comprehensive education “reform” by bypassing law and using a waiver system. Why? “Right now,” Duncan explained, “Congress is pretty dysfunctional. They’re not getting stuff done.”

Hate to break the news to you, Arne; for many Americans, stopping this administration from “getting stuff done” is getting stuff done. …

Bret Stephens gets it. 

The aircraft was large, modern and considered among the world’s safest. But that night it was flying straight into a huge thunderstorm. Turbulence was extreme, and airspeed indicators may not have been functioning properly. Worse, the pilots were incompetent. As the plane threatened to stall they panicked by pointing the nose up, losing speed when they ought to have done the opposite. It was all over in minutes.

Was this the fate of Flight 447, the Air France jet that plunged mysteriously into the Atlantic a couple of years ago? Could be. What I’m talking about here is the Obama presidency.

When it comes to piloting, Barack Obama seems to think he’s the political equivalent of Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Yeager and—in a “Fly Me to the Moon” sort of way—Nat King Cole rolled into one. “I think I’m a better speech writer than my speech writers,” he reportedly told an aide in 2008. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m . . . a better political director than my political director.”

On another occasion—at the 2004 Democratic convention—Mr. Obama explained to a Chicago Tribune reporter that “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play at this level. I got game.” …

…  But it takes actual smarts to understand that glibness and self-belief are not sufficient proof of genuine intelligence. Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump. The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does.

Jennifer Rubin says it is about time the left figured out what we have know for years.

Poor Evan Thomas will never live down his ludicrous comment that President Obama was “sort of God.” What seemed like slobbering now seems outright dumb, given the president’s performance. And don’t take my word for it.

Left-wing pundits have discovered he’s sort of like Jimmy Carter. Others now comprehend he’s remote and cold. Still others recognize he is weak and ineffectual (“strangely powerless, and irresolute, as larger forces bring down the country and his presidency”).

It’s not strange at all. Conservatives have been saying the same thing for several years (ever since the 2008 campaign got underway). We noticed his contempt for his fellow citizens who “cling to guns and religion.” We noticed when his response to the Fort Hood massacre was oddly disengaged. Even the death of his political patron didn’t evoke any real emotion. …

The Daily Beast writes on the Dems who are disheartened by the president.

… During the last few days, the whispers have swelled to an angry chorus of frustration about Obama’s perceived weaknesses. Many Democrats are furious and heartbroken at how ineffectual he seemed in dealing with Republican opponents over the debt ceiling, and liberals are particularly incensed by what they see as his capitulation to conservatives on fundamental liberal principles.

In Connecticut, a businessman who raised money for Obama in 2008 said, “I’m beyond disgusted.” In New Jersey, a teacher reported that even her friends in the Obama administration are grievously disillusioned with his lack of leadership—and many have begun to whisper about a Democratic challenge for the 2012 presidential nomination. “I think people are furtively hoping that Hillary runs,” she said.

The son of a longtime Democratic congressman from Texas, a 73-year-old lawyer, is so enraged with Obama that he’s threatening not to vote for the 2012 Democratic ticket—the first time in his entire life that he’s contemplated such apostasy.

Among many of the 18 million Americans who supported Hillary Clinton in 2008, the reaction is simple and bitter: “We told you so.” …

Powerline has the story of what happened to the president’s passion as asked by a NY Times Op-Ed.

That is the question that is posed by psychology professor Drew Westen in a long essay in today’s New York Times. Westen is a stereotypical liberal who thinks Obama’s problem is that he isn’t tough enough or far-left enough. His ignorance of history is so glaring that the essay isn’t worth responding to in detail. Along the way, however, Westen does hint at the truth:

“A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted “present” (instead of “yea” or “nay”) 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.” …

Dana Milbank roughs up the administration.

A familiar air of indecision preceded President Obama’s pep talk to the nation.

The first draft of his schedule for Monday contained no plans to comment on the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating by Standard & Poor’s. Then the White House announced that he would speak at 1 p.m. A second update changed that to 1:30. At 1:52, Obama walked into the State Dining Room to read his statement. Judging from the market reaction, he should have stuck with his original instinct.

“No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a AAA country,” Obama said, as if comforting a child who had been teased by the class bully.

When he began his speech (and as cable news channels displayed for viewers), the Dow Jones industrials stood at 11,035. As he talked, the average fell below 11,000 for the first time in nine months, en route to a 635-point drop for the day, the worst since the 2008 crash.

It’s not exactly fair to blame Obama for the rout: Almost certainly, the markets ignored him. And that’s the problem: The most powerful man in the world seems strangely powerless, and irresolute, as larger forces bring down the country and his presidency. …

Andrew Malcolm noticed the market drop too.

Seeking to show leadership and calm anxiety on the first trading day after the unprecedented credit downgrade for the federal government, a beleaguered President Obama made an 11-minute financial statement this afternoon that proved prophetic.

“Markets will rise and fall,” the Democrat said, “but this is the United States of America. No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a AAA country.”

The results: On the worst day since the 2008 financial crisis, all three major U.S. stock indexes dropped between 5% and 7% with the Dow plunging 633 points to close beneath 11,000 for the first time in nine months. …

Andrew Malcolm also has late night humor.

Leno: President Obama turned 50 Thursday. A year ago he was in his forties and his approval was in the fifties. This year it’s the other way around.

Leno: President Obama is making a three-day bus tour across the Midwest later this month focused on jobs, mainly him keeping his.

Conan: Did you read about that man who jumped the White House fence? There was a brief chase, but the Secret Service was able to convince President Obama to return and continue his term.

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Strange Pickings today. Pickerhead is in the Detroit area with four grandchildren and there’s no time for an ordinary post. And, it is really tiring following the miscreants in Washington. So, today one item that is twice the length of a normal post.

This is a story from the New Jersey Ledger-Star about a scallop boat that was lost at sea two years ago this past spring. After completion of the Coast Guard investigation reporter Amy Ellis Nutt and photographer Andre Malok began a seven month investigation that was published in November 2010. Last April, the story won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. ”The Wreck of the Lady Mary” suggests the possibility the boat disappeared within minutes after being run down by a container ship. Water temperature in the North Atlantic at that time (March 2009) was 40 degrees. Six men perished. One was rescued.

Pickerhead has some familiarity with these waters from ten years ago. It was December and I was running my boat from the Virginia to New York. Teaching a class at William and Mary was the cause of the late departure. Luckily it was still warm and the water temperature was almost 70. However, that caused some fog. Fog so thick I sat over some shallow draft shoals at the beginning of the trip in the James River. Sat over them for protection from larger vessels. Finally when it cleared some it was possible to find the way down the James through the Chesapeake Bay and then up the Atlantic coast. It was possible to see only 1,000 feet or so. Then when it was time to cross the entrance to the Delaware Bay visibility closed to 500 feet.

It is a 15 mile run to cross the approaches to the Delaware River. With the chance the fog would get worse, and even with excellent GPS and good radar, the decision was made not to make the crossing. There are just too many large ships making their way perpendicular to the course I would follow. The night was spent in Indian River. And then the next night because fog was cleared by northwest winds blowing 30 to 35 miles an hour that put up waves of 8 or more feet. The next day conditions cleared. The next stop was New York harbor.

All of this is proof when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish. In my defense the safety gear (immersion suits and EPIRB) mentioned in the story are carried on my small craft. Both of those items were key to one man surviving the sinking of the Lady Mary. Had there been more than a few minutes, all of the crew might have lived.

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Of all the electrons activated so far by the downgrade, Clive Crook strikes a reasonable tone; both reassuring and foreboding. Truth be told, this was “baked in the cake” when the Obama stimulus turned out to be nothing but a payoff to his supporters.

In a way it will be puzzling if the S&P downgrade–despite all the blather about its historic significance–changes anything at all. Certainly, the news should not have come as a surprise: the agency has been talking about it for weeks and the rating for US government debt had been under formal negative review before the announcement. If there is a surprise, it is mainly that the agency had the nerve to go through with it.

More fundamentally, what new information did the downgrade and the analysis supporting it provide? None. After their performance of the past few years, rating agency analysts have, or should have, little credibility in any case. Reports of the initial $2 trillion misunderstanding in S&P’s examination of the Treasury’s books (they used the wrong CBO baseline) lend a tragicomic note, and run their reputational capital down even further. And all this would be true even if US Treasuries were arcane instruments that few investors could afford to monitor carefully, forcing them to rely on the agencies for lack of anything better. In fact, of course, US Treasuries are the most widely and intensely analyzed obligations on the planet. What does S&P know about them that you and I don’t? The informational content of the downgrade is precisely zero.

When it comes to judging market impact, two complications arise. One is the rules that some investors have adopted–or have had forced on them by regulators–obliging them to hold AAA assets. If those assets have to be dumped, the market implications would obviously be severe. According to what I read, these rules should not be triggered by a downgrade to a notch under AAA at just one agency. Federal regulators in the US, for instance, have already said that the news will have no effect on risk-based capital requirements for US banks. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors have comments. 

As the economy flatlines and stocks crater, the Pied Piper of hope and change leads us over a cliff while blowing out birthday candles at the White House and snuffing out America’s future.

This administration has been so wretched, its performance so incompetent, that we half-expect to see billboards popping up with the image of Jimmy Carter and the words, “Miss me yet?”

At least Carter, who with any luck will be supplanted in 2013 as America’s worst former president, used appropriate symbolism in donning sweaters, sitting in front of fireplaces and complaining of America’s “malaise.” …

Mark Steyn’s column was written before the downgrade, so is prescient. Was going to write “remarkably prescient” but that’s what everybody writes. So in Pickings they’re just prescient. This little aside is remarkably precious. 

… Under the “historic” “resolution” of the debt crisis (and don’t those very words “debt crisis” already feel so last week?), America will be cutting federal spending by $900 billion over 10 years. “Cutting federal spending by $900 billion over 10 years” is Washington-speak for increasing federal spending by $7 trillion over 10 years. And, as they’d originally planned to increase it by $8 trillion, that counts as a cut. If they’d planned to increase it by $20 trillion and then settled for merely $15 trillion, they could have saved five trillion. See how easy this is? …

… Like America’s political class, I have also been thinking about America circa 2020. Indeed, I’ve written a book on the subject. My prognosis is not as rosy as the Boehner-Obama deal, as attentive readers might just be able to deduce from the subtle clues in the title: “After America: Get Ready For Armageddon”. Oh, don’t worry, I’m not one of these “declinists”. I’m way beyond that, and in the express lane to total societal collapse. The fecklessness of Washington is an existential threat not only to the solvency of the republic but to the entire global order. If Ireland goes under, it’s lights out on Galway Bay. When America goes under, it drags the rest of the developed world down with it.

When I go around the country saying stuff like this, a lot of folks agree. Somewhere or other, they’ve a vague memory of having seen a newspaper story accompanied by a Congressional Budget Office graph with the line disappearing off the top of the page and running up the wall and into the rafters circa mid-century. So they usually say, “Well, fortunately, I won’t live to see it.” And I always reply that, unless you’re a centenarian with priority boarding for the Obamacare death panel, you will live to see it. Forget about mid-century. We’ve got until mid-decade to turn this thing around.

Otherwise, by 2020 just the interest payments on the debt will be larger than the U.S. military budget. That’s not paying down the debt, but merely staying current on the servicing – like when you get your MasterCard statement, and you can’t afford to pay off any of what you borrowed but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge. Except in this case the interest charge for U.S. taxpayers will be greater than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey and Israel combined. …

WSJ Op-Ed by Peter Berkowitz examines the crack-up of the progressives.

… In the congressional elections of 2010, the electorate, led by the tea party movement and disaffected independents, rendered its judgment on the president’s priorities. The people dealt him and his party a historic midterm defeat, producing large Republican gains in the Senate and a comfortable majority in the House, including 87 freshmen.

The voters’ message was clear: Cut spending, compel the government to live within its means, and put Americans back to work. In short, the president and his party badly overreached in 2009 and 2010; and in 2011 the Republicans, to the extent their numbers in Congress allowed, have effectively pushed back.

But that’s not how progressives have tended to see things. They have ferociously attacked congressional Republicans, particularly those closely associated with the tea party movement, with something approaching hysteria.

Consider the unabashed incivility of progressive criticism, its tone dictated from the top. During and after the budget negotiations, we heard that tea party representatives were content with “blowing up our government” (Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne). Then came accusations that “Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people” (New York Times columnist Joe Nocera), while acting like “a maniacal gang with knives held high” (New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd). At the height of negotiations, Vice President Biden either said, or agreed with House Democrats with whom he was meeting who said, that Congressional Republicans “have acted like terrorists.”

In addition, progressive legal scholars concocted a wild theory to justify an executive power grab by means of which President Obama would unilaterally raise the debt ceiling to avoid having to hammer out a deal with Congress. …

Michael Barone says Americans want to earn their success.

Why aren’t voters moving to the left, toward parties favoring bigger government, during what increasingly looks like an economic depression? That’s a question I’ve asked, and one that was addressed with characteristic thoughtfulness by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg in the New York Times last week.

Greenberg argues that voters agree with Democrats on issues but don’t back them on policy because they don’t trust government to carry it out fairly. I think he overstates their agreements on policies: They may favor “investment in education” until they figure out that it actually means political payoffs to teachers’ unions.

But his larger point rings true. He points out that “the growth of self-identified conservatives” began during the fall 2008 debate over the TARP legislation supported by George W. Bush, Barack Obama and John McCain. The voters’ take: “Government works for the irresponsible, not the responsible.” …

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Some of our favorites react to the downgrade. John Podhoretz first.

This is a terrible day. …

 … This is a colossal disaster for Barack Obama?, and anybody who says otherwise is kidding himself or trying to spin you. We know that the election of 2012 is going to be fought on jobs, the economy, and the wisdom of health care. But now the GOP has an overarching theme that I predict will be at the core of a $500 million advertising campaign: “America needs its good name back.”

Mark Steyn.

As the author of a suitably apocalyptic book to be released on Monday, I’m grateful to Standard & Poor’s for providing the ultimate publicity tie-in. (Junk rating by the time of the paperback edition?) The frivolousness of the political theater in Washington this last month and its mostly fraudulent media coverage did huge damage to the United States. It confirmed to the world, as S&P’s analysis suggests, that Washington is institutionally incapable of genuine reform. This was one of those it’s-the-music-not-the-lyrics moments: As damaging as the specifics of the ”deal” were, the broader sub-text of a political class pretending that it was meaningful was even more so.  

We don’t have till 2021. As I say in my column tomorrow, we have till mid-decade to turn this thing around, or it’s over. …

From Pajamas Media.

… Just a couple of years in that big house in Washington and you and your spendthrift colleagues have managed to blight the most productive economy the world has ever seen. Thank you Mr. President!

What planet are you and Joe Biden and Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid from?

In the space of two years, you have done more damage to this economy — which means the future not only of this country but the rest of what you would disdain to call the civilized world — than any President in history. You are a poor man’s Jimmy Carter, a midget Herbert Hoover, a disaster for this country and the world. …

Nile Gardiner

… Since President Obama took office in January 2009, the United States has embarked on the most ambitious failed experiment in Washington meddling in US history. Huge increases in government spending, massive federal bailouts, growing regulations on businesses, thinly veiled protectionism, and the launch of a vastly expensive and deeply unpopular health care reform plan, have all combined to instill fear and uncertainty in the markets. Free enterprise has taken a backseat to continental European-style interventionism, as an intensely ideological left wing administration has sought to dramatically increase the role of the state in shaping the US economy. The end result has been a dramatic fall in economic freedom, sluggish growth, poor consumer confidence, high unemployment, a collapsing housing market, and an overall decline in US prosperity, with more than 45 million Americans now reliant on food stamps – that’s over one seventh of the entire country….

At the end of last week we trashed the idea of the super committee. Charles Krauthammer says it may have value.

Conventional wisdom holds that the congressional super-committee established by the debt-ceiling deal to propose further deficit reduction will go nowhere. I’m not so sure. There is a grand compromise to be had. It does, however, require precise sequencing. To succeed it must proceed in three stages:

(1) Tax Reform.

True tax reform that removes loopholes while lowering tax rates is the Holy Grail of social policy. It appeals equally to left and right because, almost uniquely, it promotes both economic efficiency and fairness. Economic efficiency — because it removes tax dodges that distort capital flows (and thereby diminish productivity) while cutting marginal tax rates (thereby spurring growth). Fairness — because a corrupted tax code with myriad breaks grants deeply unfair advantage to the rich who buy the lobbyists who create the loopholes and buy the lawyers who exploit them.

Which is why the 1986 Reagan-Bradley tax reform was such a historic success. It satisfied left and right, promoted efficiency and fairness, and helped launch two decades of almost uninterrupted economic expansion. …

Of course Pickings readers know that government efforts to heap mortgages on poor credit risks would have devastating unintended consequences. Thomas Sowell on how it worked out.

Many years ago, the Saturday Evening Post was one of the best-known magazines in America. But somehow I learned that the Saturday Evening Post was actually published on Wednesday morning. That was a little disconcerting at first. But it was one of the most valuable lessons, that words do not necessarily reflect reality.

Recent statistics on the average wealth or net worth of blacks are a painful reminder that rhetoric favoring blacks does not mean that politicians using such rhetoric are actually helping blacks. The media seized upon the statistics published by the Pew Research Center to show that whites averaged far more net worth than blacks, and that this disparity was now greater than it was in years past. But what is even more revealing is that the net worth of blacks in 2009 was less than half of what it was in 2005.

What happened to cause such a sharp loss in such a few years? After all, the Republicans controlled both the Congress and the White House in 2005, and the Democrats had control by 2009. There was now a black President of the United States, with much of the media celebrating the beginning of a new era in race relations.

What happened was that the political words had no relationship to the economic reality. But few people judge any administration’s effect on blacks by what actually happens to blacks under that administration.

A finer breakdown of the data on the net worth of blacks shows that the most drastic loss of net worth was in the value of the homes owned by blacks. This occurred after years of both Democratic and Republican administrations pushing policies designed to enable more blacks to buy homes. …

More on misleading words from T. Sowell.

… Virtually everyone living in “poverty,” as defined by the government, has color television, and most have cable TV or satellite TV. More than three-quarters have either a VCR or a DVD player, and nearly nine-tenths have a microwave oven.

As for being “ill-housed,” the average poor American has more living space than the general population — not just the poor population — of London, Paris and other cities in Europe.

Various attempts have been made over the years to depict Americans in poverty as “ill-fed” but the “hunger in America” campaigns that have enjoyed such political and media popularity have usually used some pretty creative methods and definitions.

Actual studies of “the poor” have found their intake of the necessary nutrients to be no less than that of others. In fact, obesity is slightly more prevalent among low-income people.

The real triumph of words over reality, however, is in expensive government programs for “the elderly,” including Medicare. The image often invoked is the person who is both ill and elderly, and who has to choose between food and medications.

It is great political theater. But, the most fundamental reality is that the average wealth of the elderly is some multiple of the average wealth owned by people in the other age brackets.

Why should the average taxpayer be subsidizing people who have much more wealth than they do? …

Canada’s National Post says the proposed solutions to no growth will continue – no growth.

… To those of us on the outside of the economics profession, the sound of the internal crash of the pillars of interventionism is becoming deafening. While contradictions pile up, the advice still keeps flowing. Deficits are bad, spending must be cut to save the economy. But if spending is cut, the economy will suffer. While politicians struggle to interpret the contradictory incantations of economists, the world is struggling under a burden of growth-killing policies.

Banks are being regulated to an extent never seen before, forcing the world’s core providers of credit for business expansion to curb their appetite for risk. Confusion reigns as global and trans-national regulators blunder their way to impose ill-conceived rules and policies. The hard reality of new rules, especially new capital requirements, is that it forces banks to accumulate risk-free liabilities while curbing risk-taking loans.

The world’s energy markets are under constant assault from governments that want to force innovation by fiat. Carbon taxes and green-energy initiatives that are uneconomic have two growth-killing impacts. First, they force capital out of economically productive investments into projects that are intrinsically uneconomic. Investors will not put money into wind turbines because they are uneconomic. Throwing subsidies at wind power does not create net new jobs and growth; it kills jobs and growth by forcing others to cover the cost of the uneconomic activity.

In the auto industry, meanwhile, sales are flat and show no signs of returning to production levels of the past. In the face of this ongoing slump, the U.S. government will force auto companies to spending billions to meet tough fuel-efficiency standards that will raise the price of cars. Whatever they teach in economics these days, some logic must seep into the curriculum. This is not a growth plan.

Similar government interventions, bolstered by constant calls for more spending and taxes, are the norm through most of the G20 membership. To end the many debt crises, the first step should be to abandon growth-killing policies. With growth, even debts cease to be a problem.

The Economist reviews a book on our history with dogs.

THE relationship between people and dogs is unique. Among domesticated animals, only dogs are capable of performing such a wide variety of roles for humans: herding sheep, sniffing out drugs or explosives and being our beloved companions. It is hard to be precise about when the friendship began, but a reasonable guess is that it has been going strong for more than 20,000 years. In the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche region of France, which contains the earliest known cave paintings, there is a 50-metre trail of footprints made by a boy of about ten alongside those of a large canid that appears to be part-wolf, part-dog. The footprints, which have been dated by soot deposited from the torch the child was carrying, are estimated to be about 26,000 years old.

The first proto-dogs probably remained fairly isolated from each other for several thousand years. As they became progressively more domesticated they moved with people on large-scale migrations, mixing their genes with other similarly domesticated creatures and becoming increasingly dog-like (and less wolf-like) in the process. For John Bradshaw, a biologist who founded the anthrozoology department at the University of Bristol, having some idea about how dogs got to be dogs is the first stage towards gaining a better understanding of what dogs and people mean to each other. Part of his agenda is to explode the many myths about the closeness of dogs to wolves and the mistakes that this has led to, especially in the training of dogs over the past century or so. …

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In a brilliant Corner post, Nicole Gelinas likens the new 12 person budget committee to the financial system’s attempt to offload sub-prime mortgage risk.

… Now, clever politicians think that they can transfer the responsibility of deciding what kind of spending we’re going to cut — entitlements to pay for the past, or infrastructure investments to pay for the future — to a committee that is of the political system but also somehow outside of it.

It’s a political derivative — and it won’t work. Come December 23rd, the results of this political derivative will boomerang right back to the politicians and the nation. 

And remember: Politicians purposely — and foolishly — manufactured this particular crisis so that they could show how forward-thinking they were in saving us from it. No wonder financial markets — also in turmoil because of Europe right now — are skeptical of the exercise and the outcome. …

Alana Goodman, in Contentions, illustrates the uncertainty created in the super committee.

As we await the creation and deliberation of the “super committee” to determine the future of national defense, it’s worth taking a look at how this instability impacts the economy.

The prospect of massive – and unpredictable – future defense cuts isn’t just a concern for national security officials. It’s also reportedly spooking defense contractors, who are hesitant to hire new employees in such a volatile atmosphere.

From reading local news reports, we learn communities across the country are already bracing for the prospect of additional economic turbulence:

San Diego:

“The impreciseness of the deal and the uncertainty about where budget cuts will come from does little to help the fragile economic recovery in San Diego and could potentially have a huge impact on the region’s job growth in the coming years, experts said.

The deal imposed $1 trillion in budget reductions over the next decade but did not outline where cuts would be made, virtually ensuring continued hesitance among consumers and businesses that will keep them from spending. That doubt is expected to guarantee the unemployment rate in the county will remain about 10 percent through the rest of the year with very little job growth, experts said.” …

The National Journal says the super committee will create super lobbyists.

… When the Divine Dozen are named, it will lead “to the emergence of a pack of superlobbyists who will have access to those members” and who can try to protect clients from the carnage, said Democratic consultant David Di Martino. That’s because with only six members from each party on the committee, influencing the super committee will largely be an inside game with Democratic and Republican lobbyists working their respective lawmakers.

Each appointment will be closely watched for the signals it sends about the direction of the super committee, more formally known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.

“The bubbling, No. 1 question in the last 24 hours for downtown is, ‘Who are the 12 going to be?’ Because that will shape what the super committee will or will not tackle,” Republican lobbyist Kirk Blalock said.

A Democratic insider put the concern more bluntly: “If you’re a company with a major stake in what’s going to happen in the super committee and you have a team that has no connection to those members, you’re probably going to be looking for additional help”—an observation that may turn out to be a colossal understatement. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors say it is a sham to say these are budget cuts.

… According to IBD’s analysis of available budget numbers, the deal’s $2.4 trillion in 10-year cuts amounts to a mere 5% trim off total projected federal spending during that time. It’s like a 400-pound man boasting that he plans to drop 20 pounds over a decade, while his doctors warn about the risks of losing weight so fast.

Even calling these “cuts” is a bit of a stretch, since spending will continue to increase, just at a slightly slower pace. (See charts below.) By 2021, federal spending would still equal 22% of the nation’s economy, above the post-World War II average of 20%. Not really a cut, is it?

Plus, in the short term, these “deep,” “sharp,” “slashing” cuts would still leave the federal government spending roughly 4% more in 2012 than it did in 2010, and 20% more than it did in 2008.

Shorn of all the hyperbole, what this agreement really demonstrates is why it’s so hard to get federal spending under control. Both sides routinely use budget gimmicks to exaggerate spending cuts, while armies of special interests swarm Washington to make sure their pet programs don’t get touched. …

In a courageous blog post, Charles Lane points out the hypocrisy in the liberals calling the tea parties “terrorists.” 

If liberals believe anything, it is that the right is either solely, or mostly, responsible for the degradation of political discourse in America. And they are surely correct to condemn such ugly rhetorical excesses as the Obama-is-Hitler placards that flowered across the land in the summer of 2009. 

But liberals are in deep, deep denial about their own incivility issues. Consider the “terrorism” analogy now being aimed at the Tea Party by Democratic members of Congress — in the acquiescent presence of the vice president, no less — and by some journalists who sympathize with the Democrats. To pick just one example of the genre, today’s New York Times carries Joe Nocera’s column, “Tea Party’s War Against America.”

According to Nocera, President Obama’s debt-ceiling deal with the Republicans violated a basic rule: “Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.” He adds: “Much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.” These “intransigent” spending cutters were indifferent to “blowing up the country” in pursuit of their goals. They are indifferent to “inflicting more pain on their countrymen” via “the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class” and the extra unemployment it will bring. 

I’m puzzled. The Times editorial board only recently condemned “many on the right” for “exploit[ing] the arguments of division,” and “demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats.” Right-wingers, The Times notes, “seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.” 

So how can it be okay for Times columnists to demonize the Tea Party and try to persuade Americans that they are not just misguided, but the enemies of the people? …

Jennifer Rubin calls BS on the president’s claim he is pushing free trade deals.

One of the more disingenuous aspects of President Obama’s Rose Garden speech yesterday was his plea to pass three pending free-trade deals. He said, “I want Congress to pass a set of trade deals — deals we’ve already negotiated — that would help displaced workers looking for new jobs and would allow our businesses to sell more products in countries in Asia and South America, products that are stamped with the words ‘Made in America.’” Does he?

At every turn, the administration has dragged its heels and come up with one excuse after another. He has done nothing to accelerate ratification of the deals. …

… Given the way the debt-ceiling deal worked out, you can understand what is going on here. Obama in theory might favor passage of the trade deals. But he lacks the ability to galvanize his own party and the will to buck his union patrons. So nothing happens. It is quintessential, impotent Obama.

Peter Wehner with notes on the One’s fall.

If you want to gauge how upset President Obama’s liberal base is with him right now, consider the words of Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, who said this as the final debt ceiling deal was coming together: “I am just sorely upset that Obama doesn’t seize the moment. That’s what great presidents do in times of crisis. They exert executive leadership. He went wobbly in the knees.”

This isn’t simply stating a policy difference with the president; it’s a barely concealed assault on his character and fortitude.

It highlights not simply the unhappiness prominent Democrats have with Obama, but their borderline contempt for him.

I don’t think people fully realize just how weak and incapacitated the debt ceiling debate has left the president. But fairly soon, it’ll become clear enough.

His presidency is coming apart, and he doesn’t have a clue how to repair it. Obama’s fall from grace has been quite remarkable, and I suspect it’s nowhere near finished.

Iain Murray and Mark Steyn post in The Corner on lemonade stands. Here’s Mark;

… the state enforcers won’t let you make lemonade.

Iain Murray wrote yesterday about the spate of lemonade-stand crackdowns by this once great republic’s depraved regulatory class. This is not a small thing. A land in which a child requires hundreds of dollars of permits to sell homemade lemonade in his front yard is, in a profound sense, no longer free: It is exactly the kind of micro-regulatory tyranny of which Tocqueville warned two centuries ago.

Guest-hosting for Rush a week or two back, I suggested en passant that we needed a children’s version of the Tea Party — a Lemonade Party. I see now that a concerned citizen is organizing a Lemonade Freedom Day for August 20th.

By the way, our fellow NR cruiser Ed Driscoll has posted an excerpt from my new book about another curious priority of the control freaks of the Brokest Nation In History: The church bake-sale pie crackdown. I hesitate to channel Martin Niemöller (“First they came for the kid next door’s lemonade stand and I did nothing, then they came for the widder woman across the street’s maple pecan pie”), but this is a sustained assault by the state on civic participation, and thus on citizenship itself.

The proper response of any self-respecting seven-year-old girl on being told she needs the state’s permission to sell homemade lemonade is, “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: A new poll says only 17% of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction. I think it’s time for a female president. At least she’d stop and ask for directions.

Conan: The U.S. government is nearly out of money to pay its bills. Things are so bad, America may have to move in for a while with Canada.

Letterman: So the deficit talks keep breaking down. And right about now Obama, the president, he wishes he was born in Kenya.

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Paul Ryan calls out the president. Wants to know where his budget is. 

During the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling, President Obama reportedly warned Republican leaders not to call his bluff by sending him a bill without tax increases. Republicans in Congress ignored this threat and passed a bill that cuts more than a dollar in spending for every dollar it increases the debt limit, without raising taxes.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama signed this bill into law. He was, as he said, bluffing.

Nevertheless, the president still hasn’t shown us his cards. He still hasn’t put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of ever-rising spending and debt, and his evasiveness is emblematic of the party he leads.

Ever since they abused the budget process to jam their health-care takeover through Congress last year, the Democrats have simply done away with serious budgeting altogether. The simplest explanation—and the president’s real bluff—is that they don’t want to commit publicly to the kind of tax increases and health-care rationing that would be required to sustain their archaic vision of government.

The president’s February budget deliberately dodged the tough choices necessary to confront the threat of runaway federal spending. It was rejected unanimously in a Senate controlled by his own party. …

Michael Barone thinks the president was missing in action.

In the negotiations that produced the bill the 44th president of the United States seemed to be more of an onlooker than a participant.

The president went into this controversy well armed. The Constitution grants him a veto which can be overridden only by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. Administratively he has at hand the expertise of the career professionals in the Office of Management and Budget and a competent and experienced budget director. He had the political weapon of the threat of chaos and economic disaster if the deadline of August 2, set by his Treasury secretary last April, was not met. …

… Obama promised to unite the country. Instead he has united the opposition, antagonised the centre and demoralised his base. Let us just say this is not what he set out to do.

David Harsanyi celebrates the success of the “terrorists” in Washington.

… No amount of hysterics changes the fact that there has been realignment to the national conversation. The country has been radicalized by reality. A new CNN poll finds that though they rightly disapprove with everyone involved, 65 percent of those polled think that cuts in the debt deal were appropriate. Most polls find that voters believe government is too large and favor spending cuts. Remember that polls showed that most voters were against raising the debt limit at all.

It’s not the terrorists who drive this change. It’s the evidence. It’s the economic suffering that “spreading it around” policy has created. It’s institutionalization of a recession. For a while, at least, those who claim that bankruptcy spending and bullet trains create jobs — no matter how regularly the media offer these myths as fact — can’t be taken seriously.

Fleeting as this shift may be, we were brought a sliver of good news this week. During one glorious day, the United States passed legislation with the sole intention of cutting government rather than “creating” so-called jobs or “investing” in some cockamamie energy boondoggle or “helping” “working families” — which is, of course, the biggest help Washington can offer us. For that, we can thank the “terrorists.”

More from Harsanyi’s blog.

To put things in perspective: this year alone the federal government spent $1.7 trillion more than it took in. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the John Boehner plan (really more of a recommendation), cuts $917 billion in spending growth over 10 years. That‘s barely more than the debt ceiling hike that’s been proposed and far less than we overspent this one year alone. …

Toby Young in Telegraph Blogs has more on the victory of the tea party.

For British conservatives, the US debt deal is a thing of beauty. Under the terms of the deal, the federal government will cut spending by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years and there won’t be any corresponding increase in taxation. That is to say, the American Government has agreed to tackle its deficit by spending cuts alone. The British Government, by contrast, is planning to cut its deficit through a combination of spending cuts and tax rises – and it’s cutting it by a smaller amount.

Even if the Tory Party had won an overall majority at the last election, it’s hard to imagine it adopting such a bold fiscal policy. Yet the American Government is on the verge of adopting this plan in spite of the fact that the Democrats control the Senate and the White House. A year ago, American conservatives were showering David Cameron with praise for adopting such a radical approach to reducing Britain’s deficit and contrasting him unfavourably with their own spendthrift President. Now, our Prime Minister looks like a weak-kneed liberal in contrast to the hard-headed Obama. Whatever happened to the stimulus?

Most pundits are crediting this U-turn to the political muscle of the Tea Party and it’s true that President Obama would never have agreed to this deal if the Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives hadn’t engaged in the brinkmanship of the past few weeks. But to focus on the Tea Party is to ignore the tectonic political shift that’s taken place, not just in America but across Europe. The majority of citizens in nearly all the world’s most developed countries simply aren’t prepared to tolerate the degree of borrowing required to sustain generous welfare programmes any longer. …

Ross Douthat at the NY Times tries to understand why the administration is doing so poorly.

By rights, Barack Obama should be emerging as the big political winner in the debt ceiling debate. For months, he’s positioned himself near the center of public opinion, leaving Republicans to occupy the rightward flank. Poll after poll suggests that Americans prefer the president’s call for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to the Republican Party’s anti-tax approach. Poll after poll shows that House Republicans, not Obama, would take most of the blame if the debt ceiling weren’t raised.

Yet the president’s approval ratings have been sinking steadily for weeks, hitting a George W. Bush-esque low of 40 percent in a recent Gallup survey. The voters incline toward Obama on the issues, still like him personally and consider the Republican opposition too extreme. But they are increasingly judging his presidency a failure anyway.

The administration would no doubt blame this judgment on the steady stream of miserable economic news. But it should save some of the blame for its own political approach. Ever since the midterms, the White House’s tactics have consistently maximized President Obama’s short-term advantage while diminishing his overall authority. Call it the “too clever by half” presidency: the administration’s maneuvering keeps working out as planned, but Obama’s position keeps eroding. …

Peter Wehner reminds us just how sycophantic the mainstream press was on the election of the One.

As President Obama?’s approval drops to 40 percent and independents are fleeing him in droves, as the economy continues to stagger and comparisons to the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter? are increasingly being made by Democrats, it’s worth recalling the almost cult-like reverence Obama inspired after his election. You need not go further than this November 7, 2008 broadcast of “The Charlie Rose Show,” which featured a conversation with David Remnick of The New Yorker and historians Alan Brinkley? and Michael Beschloss?.

“The extraordinary outpouring of celebration, joy, and hope all over the world at this election is something I could never have imagined in my lifetime,” according to Professor Brinkley.”There’s a discipline to Obama that is so extraordinary,” he raved. And then he added: “I don’t think we’ve had a president since Lincoln who has the oratorical skills that Obama has. Obama has that quality that Lincoln had.”

Remnick, too, compared Obama’s rhetorical skills to Lincoln. The campaign also “shows him in a decision-making mold that is very encouraging.” Obama demonstrates a “receptivity to ideas outside the frame” and possesses a “worldview that allows for complexity.” He “assumes a maturity in the American public” and possesses “great audacity.” And not to believe Obama’s election will have “enormous effect” on the streets of Cairo, or Nairobi, or Jerusalem is “naive.” We were dealing, after all, with a tranformational president unlike any in our lifetime. …

Gateway Pundit posts on the “Jobs Bash” that will crash today’s birthday party in Chicago.

The Economist reports on social scientists who take a stab at understanding human’s gene for altruism.

THE extraordinary success of Homo sapiens is a result of four things: intelligence, language, an ability to manipulate objects dexterously in order to make tools, and co-operation. Over the decades the anthropological spotlight has shifted from one to another of these as the prime mover of the package, and thus the fundament of the human condition. At the moment co-operation is the most fashionable subject of investigation. In particular, why are humans so willing to collaborate with unrelated strangers, even to the point of risking being cheated by people whose characters they cannot possibly know?

Evidence from economic games played in the laboratory for real money suggests humans are both trusting of those they have no reason to expect they will ever see again, and surprisingly unwilling to cheat them—and that these phenomena are deeply ingrained in the species’s psychology. …