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Tony Blankley says the incompetence shows up everywhere.

… Just last week, the Obama administration sustained three self-inflicted international reversals – in Russia, China/Taiwan and the United Nations – regarding the Palestinian/Israeli peace process.

Consider Russia. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced that he would step aside to permit Vladimir Putin to run essentially unopposed for president next year. That means Mr. Putin is likely to be president of Russia for 12 more years because, constitutionally, he can now serve two more consecutive six-year terms.

Unfortunately, President Obama had placed a huge strategic bet that Mr. Putin was not coming back. CNN reported on July 6, 2009: “In an interview with the Associated Press late last week, Obama seemed to be trying to work through the sticking points by driving a bit of a wedge between Medvedev and Putin. ‘The old Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russia relations is outdated and that it’s time to move forward in a different direction,’ said Obama. ‘I think Medvedev understands that. I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.’ ”

It doesn’t take much to imagine where Mr. Putin, the former KGB operative, will place one of those booted feet when he gets back in office. That foot placement will be felt hard in Washington.

As Foreign Affairs magazine described it a few days ago, “Mr. Putin’s return is likely to complicate Russia’s thawing relations with the West, particularly the U.S.-Russia ‘reset’ begun in 2009. … ‘If Putin returns then I guess we will need another reset,’ joked a former high-ranking Kremlin official earlier this month. The White House said on Saturday that it would keep making progress in the reset regardless of who the next Russian president was.”

It’s not just that the president has given away a lot to gain Mr. Medvedev’s approval – now of no value to us – by: 1) reneging on our anti-missile defensive commitment to our friends Poland and the Czech Republic and 2) publicly attacking the corruption of Mr. Putin’s associates in order to try making Mr. Medvedev look stronger to his fellow Russians. It’s hard enough for an American president to dabble in American politics, let alone Russian domestic politics. Most shrewd American presidents resist the temptation that Mr. Obama could not. …

Christopher Hitchens lays out the case against Pakistan.

In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Lt. Milo Minderbinder transforms the mess accounts of the American airbase under his care into a “syndicate” under whose terms all servicemen are potential stakeholders. But this prince of entrepreneurs and middlemen eventually becomes overexposed, especially after some incautious forays into Egyptian cotton futures, and is forced to resort to some amoral subterfuges. The climactic one of these is his plan to arrange for himself to bomb the American base at Pianosa (for cost plus 6 percent, if my memory serves) with the contract going to the highest bidder. It’s only at this point that he is deemed to have gone a shade too far.

In his electrifying testimony before Congress last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has openly admitted to becoming the victim of a syndicate scheme that makes Minderbinder’s betrayal look like the action of a small-time operative. In return for subventions of millions of American dollars, it now turns out, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence agency (the ISI) can “outsource” the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and several other NATO and Afghan targets, to a related crime family known as the Haqqani network. Coming, as it does, on the heels of the disclosure about the official hospitality afforded to Osama Bin Laden, this reveals the Pakistani military-intelligence elite as the most adroit double-dealing profiteer from terrorism in the entire region. …

Bret Stephens says there are many reasons to like solar power. He says that wasn’t the problem with Solyndra.

… At the same time, the market has also been plenty supportive of solar uses that actually do pay for themselves. In 1978, the first solar-powered calculator appeared. Since the 1950s, solar has dominated the powering of satellites in earth orbit. In almost every state in the union (i.e., not just in Alaska) homeowners inconvenient to the grid have found it cost-effective to combine solar with diesel generation. In sunny states solar has been used to help utilities meet peak load, as well as to power everything from railroad signaling to garden lighting.

In the decade up to 2008, solar panel shipments grew at an average of 46% every year. In 2008 alone, total global private investment in solar technology topped $16 billion.

Not only is solar a big industry, with lots of expertise, lots of experience, and highly capable of figuring out where its opportunities lie. But notice something else: Solar still isn’t competitive with traditional fuels for most applications. Nor is there the slightest reason to believe that only the absence of government spending stands between us and a solar revolution. Worse, even if it did, that still wouldn’t justify subsidizing a Solyndra.

You can read a lot of poorly reasoned defenses from the typical offenders along the lines of, “It’s OK Solyndra failed since the whole point is for the government to take risks the private sector won’t.”

This illustrates what might be called the macro Solyndra policy failure. A poor commercial risk is a poor commercial risk, whether private or government investors take it.

But Solyndra is also a micro failure. Think about it this way: The Manhattan Project was an engineering venture aimed at putting into effect a solution already thoroughly understood in theoretical terms. No such solution is in sight for the fundamental problem holding back solar, which isn’t energy collection at all but storage—a problem that’s not even unique to solar (see plug-in cars, laptops and phones charged on the grid).

Because there are no generation costs and sunshine is abundant, collection (Solyndra’s business) does not have to be particularly efficient if you can solve the storage problem. Likewise, in the absence of a storage solution, incremental gains in collection efficiency like those pursued by Solyndra do little to alter deployment prospects.

Joel Kotkin thinks if you want to create jobs, look to traditional energy industries.

… But the biggest growth by far has taken place in the mining, oil and natural gas industries, where jobs expanded by 60%, creating a total of 500,000 new jobs. While that number is not as large as those generated by health care or education, the quality of these jobs are far higher. The average job in conventional energy pays about $100,000 annually — about $20,000 more than finance or professional services pay. The wages are more than twice as high as those in either health or education.

Nor is this expansion showing signs of slowing down. Contrary to expectations pushed by “peak oil” enthusiasts, overall U.S. oil production has grown by 10% since 2008; the import share of U.S. oil consumption has dropped to 47% from 60% in 2005.  Over the next year, according to one recent industry-funded study, oil and gas could create an additional 1.5 million new jobs.

This, of course, violates the widespread notion that the future lies exclusively in the information and technology industries. While technology may well be ubiquitous, as a sector it is far from a reliable creator of high-wage jobs. Since 2006 the information sector has hemorrhaged over 330,000 jobs. And those who do have jobs make on average about $20,000 less than their oil-stained counterparts per year.

How about those “green jobs” so widely touted as the way to recover the lost blue-collar positions from the recession? Since 2006, the critical waste management and remediation sector — a critical portion of the “green” economy — actually lost over 480,000 jobs, 4% of its total employment. Pay here is lower still, averaging something like $32,000 annually, about one-third that of the conventional energy sector. …

Jonah Goldberg says healthcare was a step too far.

… In March 2010, liberal columnist Peter Beinart argued that, for decades, Democratic politicians treated America’s innate conservatism like a slumbering bear: If you make no sudden moves and talk quietly, you can get a lot done. But if you wake the bear, as Democrats did in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the ursine silent majority will punish you.

But Obama promised to change that. He was tired of the timid, almost apologetic talk. He was going to be an FDR, or at least a Reagan for liberalism. He was going to “fundamentally transform” the country. And to those who counseled that Democrats can’t govern that way, Obama and his followers responded with shouts of “Yes, we can!”

You might think it was those shouts that woke the bear, but that’s not what happened. After all, Obama enjoyed stunning popularity when he entered the Oval Office.

No, it wasn’t words but deeds that roused the beast. The poorly crafted, deeply partisan stimulus was like a sharp stick to the bear’s belly. But it was “Obamacare” that ended the hibernation.

Despite his deployment of every rhetorical weapon in the progressive arsenal, Obama could never make the thing popular. At town hall meetings, the bear growled and snorted, in a posture that the experienced psephological woodsman understands means “leave the bear alone.” The Democratic response was to mock the grizzly. Nancy Pelosi even called the town hall protesters “un-American.” …

Roger Simon reviews Herman Cain’s campaign book.

The secret of Herman Cain is that he seems — at least to me — genuinely to be a mentally healthy human being.

This is no small thing, particularly in the world of politics — even more so presidential politics, where large dollops of nearly clinical narcissism are necessary to propel the ambition needed to run for this most powerful of offices.

As most of us know by now, Cain leavens his narcissism with generous jolts of humor — much of it self-deprecating — that make him, at this moment anyway, the most engaging figure on the political scene.

But beneath the humor is the more serious tale of a self-made man who has pulled himself up by the proverbial bootstraps — a “po’” boy (not a poor boy), as he describes himself in his just released autobiography campaign manifesto, This Is Herman Cain: My Journey to the White House. …

Andrew Malcolm has late-night humor.

Letterman: There’s a fabulous new CBS show out called ‘Unforgettable.” It’s about a woman who remembers every minute of her life. A woman who, I think, it’s called a wife.

Conan: Big news story out today that SAT reading scores have reached an all-time low. Or as the headline put it, “SATs Be Most Baddest.”
Leno: President Obama says his new jobs bill will create 1.9 million new jobs, up to 50 of them right here in America.

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Robert Samuelson should scare you with his latest column.

… There’s too much debt. In the spring of 2010, the interest rates demanded by financial markets indicated that about 5 percent of the euro zone’s debt was considered highly risky, says the IMF. That represented only Greece. By late summer 2011, the portion judged risky was 46 percent and included Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Belgium. If financial markets added France to this group — a possibility — the share of threatened debt would rise to 66 percent.

It’s implausible that the strong half or third of the euro zone (the 17 nations using the euro) could rescue all the weaker members, in part because “strong” countries also have high debts. Everyone knows about the debts of Greece, Italy and Ireland, which are, respectively, 166 percent, 121 percent and 109 percent of their annual output (gross domestic product). It’s less well-known that Germany’s debt is 83 percent of GDP and France’s, 87 percent. (Americans should not smirk. The U.S. debt — using similar assumptions — is 100 percent of GDP.)

Europe is hostage to financial markets because maturing loans and ongoing deficits mean many countries must regularly borrow huge amounts. Already, Greece, Ireland and Portugal have been excluded from private markets; lenders demanded crushing interest rates. That fate could await others. Some countries face staggering 2012 borrowing needs. The IMF estimates that Italy requires new loans equal to one-fourth of its GDP; for Spain and France, the amounts are about one-fifth of GDP.

Europe is caught in an economic pincer: slow-growth assaults from one side; fickle financial markets from the other. One obvious way out — the China option — seems barred by geopolitics. There is precedent. Historians blame the Great Depression’s severity in part on poor international cooperation. Economist Charles Kindleberger found a vacuum of power: Great Britain, the old economic leader, could no longer lead alone; and the United States — a replacement — wasn’t ready to help. Is there a parallel today between the United States and China? Are we repeating the mistakes of the 1930s? Unsettling questions.

Richard Epstein says read the new jobs bill and weep.

The dim news about the current economic situation has prompted the Obama administration to put forward its latest, desperate effort to reverse the tide by urging passage of The American Jobs Act  (AJA), a turgid 155-page bill. The AJA’s only certain effect is to make everything worse than it already is by asking Congress to tighten the stranglehold that government regulation has already placed on the economy.

That sad fact would certainly elude anyone who accepted the president’s justification for the AJA when he sent the bill to Congress. This bill, he said, will “put more people back to work and put more money in the pockets of working Americans. And it will do so without adding a dime to the deficit.” How? Why, by closing “corporate tax loopholes” and insisting that the wealthiest American’s pay their “fair share” of taxes.

What is so striking about Obama’s shopworn rhetoric is its juvenile intellectual quality. His explanation for how the AJA will create jobs is a non-starter because he does not explain how we get from here to there. As in so many other cases, the president thinks that waving a wand over a problem will make his most ardent wishes come true, even when similar earlier efforts have proved to be dismal failures. This dreadful hodgepodge of a bill will likely be dead-on-arrival in Congress, but it remains a patriotic duty to explicate some of its worst provisions.

The most evident feature of the AJA is that it is a combination of ill-conceived, disparate measures. The wandering quality of the bill makes it impossible to cover all of its silliness, but it is possible to focus on some of the core job provisions, all of which kill the very jobs that the AJA is supposed to create.

One does not have to dip very far into the bill to find trouble. Section 4 of the AJA imposes “Buy American” restrictions on the use of funds appropriated under this statute for work on public buildings. “[A]ll the iron, steel and manufactured goods” used on such projects are to be fabricated in the United States. There are obvious administrative difficulties in deciding what counts as a “manufactured good” for the purposes of the act. But don’t sweat the small stuff. The fatal problem with this form of jingoism is that, in the name of economic efficiency, it forces American taxpayers to pay more for less. That upside down logic may seem sensible to a die-hard Keynesian, but not to ordinary people who realize that deliberate overpayment for inferior goods makes no more sense in the public sector than in the private one.

The universal statutory command to “Buy American” is not capable of rigorous enforcement, which brings us to another problem with the bill: It allows its legislative mandates to be waived when the head of the relevant federal agency finds that its enforcement is against the “public interest,” including in hard to calculate cases where such deliberations increase project costs by 25 percent. The basic structure of the AJA thus uses large doses of administrative discretion to defang some of its most unrealistic commands. In so doing, it introduces what I have termed elsewhere the vice of government by waiver , where unbridled discretion creates uncertainty and breeds favoritism.

This process only adds to the cost of legislative enforcement. The real jobs created are for government bureaucrats who determine, under rules to be promulgated later, whether the rule or exception applies. The provision has it exactly backwards. The correct piece of legislation should provide that no recipient of funds (assuming there are any) should be allowed to impose “Buy American” preferences—ever.

Section 5 makes the same error as Section 4. One of the lasting shames of American law is the Davis-Bacon Act , passed at the height of the depression in 1931. It guaranteed the payment of “prevailing,” i.e. union, wages to workers on government jobs. For those with short memories, the 1931 statute was introduced to keep “itinerant colored workers” from the South from underbidding union workers in the North. …

Nile Gardiner notes that Americans are not fooled.

This week Gallup is unveiling a series of in-depth analyses of “Americans’ views on the role and performance of government” based on its annual Governance Survey. The first overview, released on Monday, is a real-eye opener. According to Gallup, Americans are expressing historic levels of negativity towards the US government, with “a record high 81 percent of Americans dissatisfied with the way the country is being governed,” including 65 per cent of Democrats, and 92 per cent of Republicans. Gallup concludes by stating that “Americans’ various ratings of political leadership in Washington add up to a profoundly negative review of government,” ratings which are likely to get worse during the lead up to next year’s presidential elections. …

Bart Hinkle has some answers for Liz Warren’s rant.

(5) Plenty of smart, well-meaning people also think even government’s core functions could be delivered better and for less—just as the Obama administration has used the Dartmouth Atlas to argue for greater efficiency in medical care. E.g., since 1970  inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending in public K-12 education has doubled. Class size has been cut in half. Neither change has produced any substantial effect on academic performance. Why don’t we have the equivalent of a Dartmouth Atlas for public education?

(6) Warren’s remarks epitomize the caricature of a progressive as someone who loves jobs but hates employers. She implies the captain of industry is simply sponging off society and hoarding the proceeds. But hiring workers is a huge social good. So is providing a funding basis for pensions, which generally rely on stock returns. So is creating products people want. Five bucks says Warren has a smartphone and a DVR and a bunch of other modern conveniences, and that she didn’t buy any of them with a gun to her head. So why is she so mad at the people who offered to sell them?

(8) Perhaps, like film critic Pauline Kael, who famously didn’t know anyone who had voted for Nixon, Warren doesn’t know anyone who believes government and taxes should be small. And, therefore, perhaps she does not understand their reasoning. She certainly doesn’t give any indication that she does.

So for the record, the reason is that—as Sheldon Richman wrote recently in The Freeman—“government is significantly different from anything else in society. It is the only institution that can legally threaten and initiate violence; that is, under color of law its officers may use physical force, up to and including lethal force—not in defense of innocent life but against individuals who have neither threatened nor aggressed against anyone else.” Many of those who truly love peace prefer to live in a society where the use or threat of violence is minimized.  Maybe that idea simply hasn’t crossed Warren’s mind.

Maybe that’s why she looks like she’s ready to haul off and hit someone.

The only downside to an Alaska cruise is pulling into port and seeing the largest building in town is the one occupied by offices of the federal government. A Wall Street Journal story about people who accidentally violate laws explains what the feds are doing.

For centuries, a bedrock principle of criminal law has held that people must know they are doing something wrong before they can be found guilty. The concept is known as mens rea, Latin for a “guilty mind.”

This legal protection is now being eroded as the U.S. federal criminal code dramatically swells. In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent. Today not only are there thousands more criminal laws than before, but it is easier to fall afoul of them.

As a result, what once might have been considered simply a mistake is now sometimes punishable by jail time. When the police came to Wade Martin’s home in Sitka, Alaska, in 2003, he says he had no idea why. Under an exemption to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, coastal Native Alaskans such as Mr. Martin are allowed to trap and hunt species that others can’t. That included the 10 sea otters he had recently sold for $50 apiece.

Mr. Martin, 50 years old, readily admitted making the sale. “Then, they told me the buyer wasn’t a native,” he recalls.

The law requires that animals sold to non-Native Alaskans be converted into handicrafts. He knew the law, Mr. Martin said, and he had thought the buyer was Native Alaskan.

He pleaded guilty in 2008. The government didn’t have to prove he knew his conduct was illegal, his lawyer told him. They merely had to show he had made the sale.

“I was thinking, damn, my life’s over,” Mr. Martin says.

Federal magistrate Judge John Roberts gave him two years’ probation and a $1,000 fine. He told the trapper: “You’re responsible for the actions that you take.”

Mr. Martin now asks customers to prove their heritage and residency. “You get real smart after they come to your house and arrest you and make you feel like Charles Manson,” he says.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Alaska didn’t respond to requests for comment. …

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Once and awhile something happens that helps us focus. Bill Clinton complaining about banks subprime loans is one of those instances. Investor’s Business Daily editors spotted this one.

… For good measure, Clinton late in his second term installed several of his cronies — including White House budget chief Franklin Delano Raines — in key Fannie and Freddie board positions, ensuring they continued his affordable-lending crusade well into the next administration.

By the time he left office, Clinton had changed the rules for risk in the lending business. He had fundamentally changed the home finance market for the worse.

This untold Clinton scandal stayed hidden until the bubble burst. Now the former president is conveniently a critic of the very loans he promoted.

He was all for them before he was against them.

Interestingly, “Bank Robbery” notes that the Clinton Foundation that sponsors his global initiative has scrubbed from its website Clinton’s boasts of shaking down banks for riskier minority loans.

History should deal harshly with this former president. He didn’t just damage the dignity of the presidency with his personal failings. He may have permanently damaged American living standards.

Debra Saunders deals with Dem Solyndra excuses.

Excuse No. 1: New technology start-ups by definition are risky ventures.

Problem: Solyndra engaged in profligate behavior. A Washington Post story describes the spending spree that followed the Department of Energy loan guarantee – new factory, state-of-the-art conference room, lobbying bills that grew from $160,000 in 2008 to $550,000 last year. Within a week of winning the first loan guarantee, Solyndra went back to the Department of Energy for another $400 million (which was never approved).

Excuse No. 2: Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., claimed that both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations “supported Solyndra’s loan guarantee application.”

Problem: In its final month, the Bush Department of Energy credit committee voted against a loan guarantee for Solyndra.

It was the Obama White House that pushed for early conditional approval of a Solyndra deal, …

Steve Hayward explains why Solyndra is worse than it looks.

The spectacular collapse of Solyndra has all of the trappings of an epic Washington scandal, with serial revelations of embarrassing and potentially improper White House machinations to secure a $535 million federal loan guarantee for a startup company with dubious prospects of success. The sudden bankruptcy of the Fremont, California, manufacturer of solar panels?—?after it was feted as a model creator of “green jobs” by President Obama and Vice President Biden?—?has already featured FBI raids, contentious congressional hearings, and demands for a special prosecutor to investigate. The plot thickened further last week when Solyndra’s two top executives, who made 20 trips to the White House while their loan application was under consideration, invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Even if the administration eventually escapes any finding of legal wrongdoing, Solyndra threatens to haunt the green energy campaign in much the same way that the collapse of Lincoln Savings became the emblem of the savings and loan industry’s recklessness in the 1980s. The Solyndra story includes Obama campaign donors and everybody’s favorite Wall Street whipping boy, Goldman Sachs, in the middle of the whole sorry mess. Yet it would be a mistake to mark the story down as merely another excrescence of crony capitalism. It is much worse.

The green energy lobby is probably hoping that Solyndra’s failure can be portrayed as an isolated case of illegal influence, lest it cast a shadow over the entire edifice of massive subsidies that green energy requires to survive. But Solyndra is merely the most spectacular of several recent green energy failures. And beyond the domain of green energy, the Solyndra fiasco is emblematic of the Obama administration’s economic philosophy, which harks back to the mid-20th-century hubris of state-planned enterprise. It is also fair to note that the origins of this fiasco predate the Obama administration, and illustrate the continuing incoherence and wishful thinking of U.S. energy policy.

Here’s what we know so far: Solyndra was founded in 2005 on the concept that lightweight, high-efficiency thin-film solar panels in a unique tubular design could compete effectively with traditional silicon-based flat panels. Thin-film solar is the energy equivalent of thin-thigh diets?—?dazzling results are always promised but seldom delivered. …

In a WSJ OpEd, Matt Ridley says human advances were not the result of a dramatic evolutionary step, but are the result of trade.

… There was no sudden change in brain size 200,000 years ago. We Africans—all human beings are descended chiefly from people who lived exclusively in Africa until about 65,000 years ago—had slightly smaller brains than Neanderthals, yet once outside Africa we rapidly displaced them (bar acquiring 2.5% of our genes from them along the way).

And the reason we won the war against the Neanderthals, if war it was, is staring us in the face, though it remains almost completely unrecognized among anthropologists: We exchanged. At one site in the Caucasus there are Neanderthal and modern remains within a few miles of each other, both from around 30,000 years ago. The Neanderthal tools are all made from local materials. The moderns’ tools are made from chert and jasper, some of which originated many miles away. That means trade.

Evidence from recent Australian artifacts shows that long-distance movement of objects is a telltale sign of trade, not migration. We Africans have been doing this since at least 120,000 years ago. That’s the date of beads made from marine shells found a hundred miles inland in Algeria. Trade is 10 times as old as agriculture.

At first it was a peculiarity of us Africans. It gave us the edge over Neanderthals in their own continent and their own climate, because good ideas can spread through trade. New weapons, new foods, new crafts, new ornaments, new tools. Suddenly you are no longer relying on the inventiveness of your own tribe or the capacity of your own territory. You are drawing upon ideas that occurred to anybody anywhere anytime within your trading network.

In the same way, today, American consumers do not have to rely only on their own citizens to discover new consumer goods or new medicines or new music: The Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians are also able to supply them. …

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Mark Steyn has a downer of a column. 

“It’s the end of the world as we know it,” sang the popular musical artistes REM many years ago. And it is. REM has announced that they’re splitting up after almost a third of a century. But these days who isn’t? The Eurozone, the world’s first geriatric boy band, is on the verge of busting apart. Chimerica, Professor Niall Ferguson’s amusing name for the Chinese-American economic partnership that started around the same time REM did, is going the way of Wham!, with Beijing figuring it’s the George Michael of the relationship and that it’s tired of wossname, the other fellow, who gets equal billing but doesn’t really do anything. The deeper problem may be that this is a double-act with two wossnames.

Still, it’s the end of the world as we know it. Headline from CNBC: “Global Meltdown: Investors Are Dumping Nearly Everything.” I assumed “Nearly Everything” was the cute name of a bankrupt, worthless, planet-saving green-jobs start-up backed by Obama bundlers and funded with a gazillion dollars of stimulus payback. But apparently it’s “Nearly Everything” in the sense of the entire global economy. Headline from The Daily Telegraph of London: “David Cameron: Euro Debt ‘Threatens World Stability.’” But, if you’re not in the general vicinity of the world, you should be OK. Headline from The Wall Street Journal: “World Bank’s Zoellick: World In ‘Danger Zone.’” But, if you’re not in the general vicinity of …no, wait, I did that gag with the last headline.

A woman walks in front of screens showing stocks at the Athens Stock Exchange, in Athens, on Friday, Sept. 23. Moody’s downgraded eight Greek banks Friday, citing their exposure to their government’s bonds and the deteriorating economic situation in the country as it struggles to convince creditors it’s doing enough to get more bailout cash. …

Corner Post on Cain’s speech.

From the very beginning of his speech delivered to the straw poll delegates this afternoon, Herman Cain had the audience wrapped around his finger.

“Wait a minute, whose teleprompters are these? I’m not using these,” he said of the teleprompters near-by, chuckling as the audience exploded into laughter.

He got at least seven standing ovations. His speech was constantly interrupted for applause and cheers. …

Byron York explains how Herman Cain won the Florida straw poll.

… hundreds of GOP delegates who came to Orlando intending to support Perry were having second thoughts.  They’d all been in the room for the Fox News-Google debate on Thursday night and were dismayed by Perry’s performance.  Actually, more than dismayed — some were insulted by Perry’s accusation that people who don’t support his immigration positions are heartless.  Still, they didn’t immediately drop the Texas governor, did not immediately say, “That’s it — I’m outta here.”  Rather, in the 40 hours after the end of the debate, their minds were a little more open than they had been before.  And most were specifically a little more open to Cain, who impressed them during the debate and had made a number of impromptu appearances around the hotels adjacent to the Orange County Convention Center.

But even on Saturday, Perry might still have recovered some support with an inspiring speech before the voting.  Instead, he headed off to Michigan, and it was Cain who delivered a barn-burner that brought at least seven standing ovations from the delegates.  Wavering Perry delegates became Cain voters.

“I couldn’t make up my mind,” said Thelma, from Panama City, after the vote.  “It was the speech that made the hair stand up on my arms.  It wasn’t a tingle down my leg — it was an emotional excitement that this man knows how to get our country out of trouble.” …

Corner Post links to a WaPo story on the spending blitz at Solyndra.

… As it turns out, Solyndra wasn’t just wasting money on fancy gadgets they didn’t need. Once they realized, in the words of billionaire Obama fundraiser and Solyndra investor George Kaiser: “There’s never been more money shoved out of the government’s door in world history, and probably never will be again, than in the last few months and in the next 18 months” (referring to the first stimulus package), the company spent generously on Washington lobbyists in an effort to direct even more federal dollars their way:

“Solyndra’s ability to secure federal backing also made the company eager for more assistance, interviews and records show. Company executives ramped up their Washington lobbying efforts, hiring a former Senate aide to work with the White House and the Energy Department. Within a week of getting a loan guarantee commitment from the Energy Department, Solyndra applied for another guarantee worth $400 million.” …

NY Times article shows the soft underbelly of the governing process.

Solyndra executives, seeking an edge in the competition for federal loan guarantees, began employing Washington lobbyists in 2008. The company stepped up its efforts in early 2009, retaining McBee Strategic Consulting. Five lobbyists employed by the McBee group eventually worked on Solyndra’s behalf, including Michael Sheehy, a former top aide to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader. Solyndra has paid McBee Consulting $340,000 since 2009.

Steve McBee, the firm’s founder and a former Senate aide, did not return calls seeking comment, but in an April 2009 press release he said that his firm could help technology companies gain a chunk of the projected bonanza of $100 billion in federal money for clean-energy projects.

Mr. McBee said that lobbying was not allowed as part of the process. But in early 2009, the firm filed a disclosure form saying it was retained by Solyndra to lobby on stimulus act spending related to the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program. A critical piece of the stimulus bill removed a requirement that firms like Solyndra pay a substantial up-front fee to cover the risk of a loan, a provision that had slowed approvals of loan guarantees. Once that was removed, loans began to flow and Solyndra was the first to benefit.

Over the next three years, Solyndra retained two other lobbying firms, hired two in-house lobbyists and aggressively pushed for White House meetings to plead its case. Another lobbying and public relations firm with close ties to the White House — Glover Park Group — also worked on Solyndra’s behalf.

In January 2010, four months after the loan was finalized, Solyndra executives and lobbyists pressed Gregory S. Nelson, an aide to Ms. Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, for a meeting to boast about progress at the plant financed with federal money and to discuss a possible second loan, according to White House e-mails. That meeting occurred on Jan. 15, 2010, records show. White House scheduling officials later began talks that led to Mr. Obama’s visit in May.

But signs were increasing in 2010 that the company’s business plan was imploding. The dive in silicon prices, which had started in late 2008, accelerated by the end of 2010. Solyndra sales were growing, but so were its losses. It was forced to slash prices much lower than its costs in order to compete with conventional silicon panel producers. Trade publications began to question whether Solyndra would survive — even its own accountant in March 2010 said it had “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

But Solyndra and its lobbyists continued to provide assurances to the White House and the Energy Department, which still could have stopped the flow of federal money that was being given out for construction of a new factory.

“We have no intention of going out of business,” David Miller, a Solyndra executive, wrote to Mr. Nelson, the White House aide, in July 2010. Mr. Miller, added in May 2011, as the cash crunch had severely worsened, that “we have good market momentum.”

Mr. Nelson wrote back encouraged. “Fantastic to hear that business is doing well,” he said, according to a May 2011 e-mail released by the White House. “Keep up the good work.”

Corner Post describes the disaster that has become NASA.

As scandals pile up at the White House door, another example of amateurish government mismanagement slid under the radar last week: President Obama’s NASA unveiled its new rocket system designed to lift man into space sometime after 2021 with no clear mission or objective.

This is just the latest in a long string of embarrassments for NASA since Administrator Charles Bolden and Deputy Administrator Lori Garver took over.

In January 2010, Bolden labeled NASA an “Earth improvement agency” and said it would essentially scrap manned space exploration and concentrate on “researching and monitoring climate change.” This redefined mission came with additional funding. NASA was going to spend more, and do less.

Then in July 2010, Administrator Bolden announced NASA’s mission as threefold: (1) “re-inspire children”; (2) “expand our international relationships”; and “foremost” (3) “reach out to the Muslim world.” He condescendingly explained that Muslim outreach would help Islamic nations “feel good” about their scientific accomplishments.

In this same interview, Bolden “inspired children” by declaring the United States could never reach beyond low-earth orbit again, as it did alone from 1968–1971, without international help, saying: “We’re not going to go anywhere beyond low earth orbit as a single entity. The United States can’t do it, China can’t do it — no single nation is going to go to a place like Mars alone.”

In March 2011, Russia raised the price of Americans flying on their Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station by more than 20 percent, to roughly $63 million a trip. With no near-term alternative, the United States is in no position to negotiate a better deal for taxpayers. …

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The real Obama is back, according to Charles Krauthammer.

In a 2008 debate, Charlie Gibson asked Barack Obama about his support for raising capital gains taxes, given the historical record of government losing net revenue as a result. Obama persevered: “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

A most revealing window into our president’s political core: To impose a tax that actually impoverishes our communal bank account (the U.S. Treasury) is ridiculous. It is nothing but punitive. It benefits no one — not the rich, not the poor, not the government. For Obama, however, it brings fairness, which is priceless.

Now that he’s president, Obama has actually gone and done it. He’s just proposed a $1.5 trillion tsunami of tax hikes featuring a “Buffett rule” that, although as yet deliberately still fuzzy, clearly includes raising capital gains taxes.

He also insists again upon raising marginal rates on “millionaire” couples making $250,000 or more. But roughly half the income of small businesses (i.e., those filing individual returns) would be hit by this tax increase. Therefore, if we are to believe Obama’s own logic that his proposed business tax credits would increase hiring, then surely this tax hike will reduce small-business hiring.

But what are jobs when fairness is at stake? Fairness trumps growth. Fairness trumps revenue. Fairness trumps economic logic. …

Some have asked if the president will decide to quit. Ed Morrissey says perhaps he already has.

In my latest column for The Week, I ask if we have been pondering the wrong question about Barack Obama and his falling poll numbers.  We’ve analyzed the potential for Obama to pull an LBJ and pull out of the 2012 election, or for Democrats to pressure him into quitting the race if he doesn’t reach that conclusion on his own.  With the obvious implications of Obama’s two proposals this month, the better question is whether he’s already quit being President in favor of just being a candidate:

“The plan itself broke no new ground. Indeed, it closely resembles the 2009 stimulus bill, with its mix of infrastructure spending, temporary tax breaks, and another round of bailouts for states. But if the rehashed jobs plan was a passive disappointment, Obama’s new deficit reduction plan is an aggressive partisan attack — the very kind that Obama blasted in his joint-session speech earlier in the month.” …

Andrew Malcolm spots The One touting the “intercontinental railroad.” It might be near the transcontinental one.

“We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad,” Barack Obama.

That’s what the president of the United States flat-out said Thursday during what was supposed to be a photo op to sell his jobs plan next to an allegedly deteriorating highway bridge.

A railroad between continents? A railroad from, say, New York City all the way across the Atlantic to France? Now, THAT would be a bridge!

It’s yet another humorous gaffe by the Harvard graduate, overlooked by most media for whatever reason. Like Obama saying Abraham-Come-Lately Lincoln was the founder of the Republican Party. Or Navy corpseman. Or the Austrian language. Fifty-seven states. The president of Canada. Etc.

If you talk as much as this guy likes to talk instead of governing, if you believe you are a Real Good Talker as much as this guy does, you’re gonna blow a few lines. But this many?

No doubt, we’ll see a collection of Obama’s Best Bombs on ‘Saturday Night Live’ this weekend, one right after the other. No doubt.

One week after calling the joint session speech a “bold bid to reset his presidency” Clive Crook is finding flaws.

Barack Obama’s bid to seize the initiative with a second fiscal stimulus is barely a week old and, as the president prepares to make a second announcement on the subject on Monday, already in trouble. As I argued last week, part one of the plan was good and the president’s pitch to a joint session of Congress well received in Washington. The rest of the country was less impressed.

A new CBS poll gives Mr Obama his lowest approval rating (43 per cent) and highest disapproval rating (50 per cent) of this series to date. In other polls he is doing even worse. Last week, soon after Mr Obama’s big speech, a Republican won what Democrats thought was a safe congressional seat in New York. … 

… One day, Mr Obama is the pragmatic outsider trying to talk sense into Congress. The next, he is the ardent liberal complaining about social injustice and corporate jets. The president keeps canceling himself out. Nobody is impressed, people stop listening, and he becomes irrelevant.

In the past week, Mr Obama has been attacked not just by disappointed progressives and disappointed centrists, but by party professionals close to the White House. The smell of scandal rises from a loan guarantee for a failed “green energy” venture. Excerpts from a forthcoming book show a White House at war with itself. James Carville, formerly a top Democratic strategist, tells the president to panic. Nothing is working. It seems all of a piece. …

Toby Harnden lists ten reasons why last Thursday’s debate was horrible for Rick Perry.

Let’s start with a few caveats. Rick Perry has many powerful attributes as a presidential candidates. He’s been a conservative 10-year governor of the huge state of Texas. He has a lot of Tea Party support. His chief rival Mitt Romney has a number of well-documented weaknesses. While the media often fixates on theatrics like debates, there’s a case to be made that they seldom decide who becomes a party’s nominee. And it is still early days for Perry, who has been in the race for barely six weeks. He could well become the Republican nominee – and the next President of the United States.

Having said all that, this was, unarguably, an awful night for Perry. While it might not change the dynamic of the Republican race overnight, it could well prompt supporters and donors to pause. There is likely to be  rash of media commentary and newspaper stories questioning whether, after the initially very successful launch of his candidacy, he is truly ready for primetime. So in what ways was his performance so bad? here are 10 things to think about:

1. This was Perry’s third debate. He’s no longer the rookie. Romney is much more experienced in these forums (he did 13 debates in the 2008 race and has done five this time) but Perry can’t get a pass forever. Having been below par at the Reagan Library debate in Simi Valley, California, he needed to raise his game this time. he didn’t.

2. Once again, Perry faded as the debate went on. Some Republicans speculate that he is in pain from recent back surgery and that standing up for two hours is difficult for him. He seems to find it hard at times to concentrate.Whatever the reasons for this, it needs to be tackled and corrected. …

The Economist wants to know when the word “awesome” became so awesome.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was awesome. 

If this sounds like an irreverent approach to the famous first lines of the gospel of John, I can assure you it’s not. “The word was God,” according to the original. But repeatedly in the Bible, God is “awesome”. Nehemiah, Deuteronomy and the Psalms refer to “the great and awesome God”, “mighty and awesome”, and ask worshippers to praise his “great and awesome name”. How did this once-awe-inspiring word become a nearly meaningless bit of verbiage referring to anything even mildly good? …

… “Awesome” became the default descriptor for anything good. In 1982, I was seven and I swallowed it whole. It stayed with me for decades. In 2005, I remember meeting a girl when I had just seen “Batman Begins”, the moody psychological picture that reinvigorated a tired franchise. “It’s awesome,” I told her. “Awesome. Just awesome.” She wondered, she later said, what kind of journalist had just one adjective in his vocabulary. Somehow, she married me all the same. …

Translations from Russian have similar problems. Ivan the Terrible is “Ivan Grozny” in Russian. Grozny is a Russian word that means awesome. It is a derivative of the word for thunder. Helps explain the White Russian disdain for Chechnya and the capital there – Grozny.

Remember when the “wave” was getting raves at baseball games. Seems some moron is intent on starting it again. The Week has the story.

Whoops. A “hilarious” photo of President Obama — taken during his visit this week to the United Nations — is eliciting chuckles worldwide. In a group shot of world leaders at an Open Government Partnership event, the president “moronically” waves his hand — blocking the face of Mongolian President Tsakhia Elbegdorj. (See the image at right and below). While many people initially suspected that this image was a Photoshop creation, it appears to be the real deal. Naturally, commentators are cracking wise. Here, a sampling: …

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Marty Peretz on the Middle East that is in shambles thanks to The One.

It is not actually his region. Still, with the arrogance that is so characteristic of his behavior in matters he knows little about (which is a lot of matters), he entered the region as if in a triumphal march. But it wasn’t the power and sway of America that he was representing in Turkey and in Egypt. For the fact is that he has not much respect for these representations of the United States. In the mind of President Obama, in fact, these are what have wreaked havoc with our country’s standing in the world. So what—or, rather, who—does he exemplify in his contacts with foreign countries and their leaders? His exultancy gives the answer away. It is he himself, lui-mème. Alas, he is a president disconnected from his nation, without enthusiasts for his style, without loyalists to his policies, without a true friend unless that’s what you can call his top aide de camp,Valerie Jarrett, which probably you can. Obama is lucky, but it’s the only luck he has, that there are nutsy Republican enemies who aspire to his job. Maybe Rick Perry can save him from … well, yes, himself. I wouldn’t take bets on that, though.

Obama’s first personal excursions into the Middle East as president were to Turkey and Egypt. Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed his visit. Indeed, the president’s journey set the framework for the Ottomanization of modern Turkey’s foreign policy. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne formally abrogated the empire’s previous rights in North Africa, these being the rights it had lost in the First World War. From then on, the country was content to make trouble only for the Kurds across its borders and for Greece. A member of NATO, with more than 600,000 troops under arms (omitting more than half a million reservists and paramilitary), it certainly played a role in deflecting Soviet ambitions in the Mediterranean. Now, with the Russian threat (temporarily?) deferred, the military still faces minor annoyance from Georgia, Armenia, Iraq. But since Obama communed with Erdogan—by all accounts, it was love at first sight—the prime minister has been taking on new projects. Only in the last days has he made what can reasonably be called a conqueror’s march through Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, evoking the old empire’s rule in North Africa not so long ago.

After all, let’s face it: Egypt is simply spent. Erdogan can seduce it with a speech or two. Yet it does have up-to-date military equipment. But, if it were tempted by war with Israel, Jerusalem would not give it the respectful pity that it gave Cairo’s Third Army 38 years ago. …

Claudia Rosett wants to know why we keep the UN in New York.

… Seriously, why does the setting for this have to be midtown Manhattan? At far less cost to Americans and their allies, this entire performance could more easily be staged in Doha. Or Beirut. Or Riyadh. Or Tehran. Or, for that matter, Ramallah. If the UN is going to function largely as a vehicle to serve the demands and agenda of the Middle Eastern gang now dominating the doings of the General Assembly in New York, then why should America grant the UN right-of-way in Manhattan, and pay to put fuel in the tank? Ship the whole caboodle to the Middle East. Save American taxpayers roughly $8 billion per year by letting the UN enthusiasts in that part of the world pay for it. And let the new UN patrons know that if they’re willing to play nice and pay for the tickets, American diplomats might perhaps be persuaded it’s occasionally worth the bother to drop by.

Real Clear Politics has a lengthy article by Carl Cannon on Jeb Bush’s education record in Florida.  

Rick Perry’s emergence as a prominent Republican presidential contender has confounded some conservative intellectuals, especially those who care about education reform, and not because of Perry’s mediocre grades while attending Texas A&M — or because of his education policies as governor in Austin.

When the 2012 presidential campaign season began, some GOP insiders thought their best candidate, all things being equal, might be the former governor of another Southern state. Jeb Bush was an unalloyed conservative and proven vote-getter who’d presided over a strong economy in a big state while posting a record of legislative achievement so impressive that his nickname was “King Jeb.”

His name was the two-term Florida governor’s problem when it came to any possible aspirations of national office: Not the Jeb part, or even the showy modifier, but rather the surname. It was universally believed, apparently by Jeb Bush himself, that four years wasn’t enough time to counteract the “Bush fatigue” attendant to his oldest brother’s last year in the White House.

Unexpectedly, however, a governor who walks and talks a lot more like George W. Bush than his own brother and who served under Bush in Austin has emerged as the 2012 presidential front-runner.

It’s probably too late for Jeb Bush to reconsider his 2012 options, but it’s certainly not too late to give his record in Tallahassee a second look. And in no area did Bush have more of an impact than in education policy. …

… Since 1994, the reading scores of fourth-graders in this country, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, have risen steadily. “Simply stated, poor and minority students are achieving at dramatically higher levels today than they were two decades ago — in some cases two or three grade levels higher,” writes education reformer Michael J. Petrilli. And Florida, as noted, helped lead the way.

The highlights include:

– In 1998, Florida’s fourth-graders scored at the bottom nationally in NAEP scores in reading and math. By 2009, they had scored above the national average in both categories.

– Florida’s fourth-grade Hispanic students equaled or surpassed the performance of all students in 31 states.

– Fourth-grade African American students in Florida outperform African American students in all but three states in NAEP math tests.

– Low-income Florida elementary school students of all races rank near the top nationally in math.

– High school graduation rates increased 21 percent, even as the requirements got tougher.

– Some 38,000 Florida high school students were taking Advanced Placement exams for college credit a decade ago. Offering merit pay of up to $2,000 for teachers who get students to take — and pass — AP exams helped boost this number to 157,000.

– The number of African American and Latino students passing AP tests increased 365 percent.

For skeptics who believe that standardized testing sucks the creativity out of the learning process, Jeb Bush always had a stock answer: “What gets measured, gets done.”

In the early years, things did not always go swimmingly. The teacher unions made opposing Bush a crusade, even mortgaging their own building to raise money to support his 2002 opponent in his re-election bid. Bush weathered that challenge, but gains at the middle school level didn’t really kick in until his last two years in office, leading to some testy press conferences, as his top education adviser, Patricia Levesque, recalled.

In the end, it would be nice to say that Florida’s impressive results speak for themselves, but it’s never quite that simple in the politics of education.

David Harsanyi says why not eat the rich.

… When President Barack Obama unveiled his new un-passable “deficit reduction plan,” many accused him of playing class envy. The plan ostensibly calls for $1 in budget cuts (cuts that would never happen) for every $1 in tax increases ($1.5 trillion). And if we’re not willing to ask more from the rich, says the president, “then the logic — the math — says everybody else has to do a whole lot more; we’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor.”

This argument is offered by Obama in endless iterations, but it won’t add up until we invent an Arabic numeral that signifies a lie. In no way, by no percentage, no matter how you quantify or qualify or twist it, does the middle class (or certainly the poor) pay more in taxes than the rich. As an Associated Press fact check put it, “on average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data.”

That doesn‘t mean a person can’t argue the rich should pay more than the 80 or 90 percent of federal taxes they already do. Go for it. In that debate, Republicans can make many strong arguments about how tax-the-rich schemes (seemingly Obama’s sole idea) are counterproductive. But there are three points that they can’t make but should. …

Joel Kotkin analyzes the vote in NY’s 9th congressional district.

… Some Democrats like California Rep. Henry Waxman have another explanation for the vote: greed. “They want to protect their wealth,” he explained, “which is why a lot of well-off voters vote for Republicans.” You almost have to admire the chutzpah of such views from a man who represents Beverly Hills.

Waxman, of course, is wrong. This election was driven not by desertions of the rich but by the shift to the GOP among largely middle or working class voters. In many ways this election followed the pattern established by Sen. Scott Brown’s stunning 2009 Massachusetts victory, which came largely from middle-income voters. The ninth district’s new representative, Bob Turner, won big in modest Middle Village and South Brooklyn, while losing decisively in the wealthiest precincts such as Forest Hills and some minority, immigrant-oriented enclaves.

The big story here, as Bronstein suggests, lies in the growing unease about the national and New York economies among large sections of the city’s beleaguered middle class. Despite the enormous wealth generated on Wall Street, New York’s middle class has been fleeing the city at breakneck speed for decades.

According to the Brookings Institution, New York has suffered the fastest declines of middle class neighborhoods in the U.S.: Its share of middle income neighborhoods is roughly half that of Seattle or the much maligned Long Island suburbs. Twenty-five percent of New York City was middle-class in 1970, but by 2008 that figure had dropped to 16%.

Even the young, who so dominate parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, do not appear to be hanging around once they get into their 30s, particularly after their children reach school age. One reason: Bloomberg’s much touted school reforms have been, for the most part, ineffective in turning the bulk of the city’s public schools around. …

James Delingpole spots another rogue trader.

A rogue trader at one of the world’s largest banks (USA Inc., second in economic power only to China Inc.) has been exposed as the biggest fraudster in the history of mankind. The fraud – conservatively estimated at $38.6 billion, though others believe it could be at least 20 times bigger once his secret trading accounts in a file mysteriously marked “Stimulus Package” are fully investigated – comfortably exceeds the paltry $2.3 billion losses run up by UBS trader Kweku Adoboli.

Though full details of the Uber Rogue Trader – known only by his initials B.O. – have yet to be released, he is believed to be either of Hawaiian or Kenyan birth, with a plausible speaking manner and a deceptive aura of competence and gravitas. He is said to be “coolly unrepentant” about his crime, which, he claims, he was only doing to provide “hope and change” to his 200 million victims. …

Dilbert thinks liberal attacks have gone over the top.

… Consider Rick Perry. He called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” As analogies go, that’s a good one. I believe I have used it myself. It’s a colorful way of saying the math doesn’t work well when the population of retired people greatly increases and the number of workers funding Social Security does not. Literally no one on Earth disagrees with the central point of Perry’s analogy. But I keep seeing Perry’s Ponzi scheme quote reported as if it were some sort of idiot misunderstanding or conspiracy theory or foreshadowing of evil. WTF?

I’ve never seen more vicious, cheap attacks on a candidate than I’ve seen leveled at Michelle Bachmann. Recently she made a glancing reference to a well-known joke/parable about God using natural disasters to get the attention of humans. When I read Bachmann’s quote, I understood her generic point that politicians need to open their eyes to both the problems and the solutions in front of them. The liberal media reported the quote as if a crazy street person was yelling that God sent floods as a message. …

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IBD editors on LightSquared.

The Air Force’s Space Command chief was pressured to alter testimony about the danger of a wireless project developed by a Democratic donor’s company. Are lives as well as money being put at risk?

Crony capitalism, which has been rampant in President Obama’s push for green energy, is one thing. Rewarding donors with stimulus dollars is merely the “Chicago Way” brought to Washington, D.C.

But when ideology combines with cronyism to place American lives and the nation’s security at risk, it’s quite another thing.

At issue is a plan by Reston, Va.-based satellite broadcast communications company LightSquared to build a next-generation 4G wireless phone network. Many at the Pentagon, including Space Command chief Gen. William Shelton, think the system would seriously hinder the effectiveness of high-precision GPS receiver systems on which the military and many others depend.

The general’s public testimony last Thursday before the members of the House subcommittee on strategic forces came a week after a classified briefing where the same subcommittee had been told, according to chairman Michael Turner, R-Ohio, that the impact of LightSquared’s 4G network of some 40,000 broadcast towers would be “unacceptable.”

Gen. Shelton dropped a precision-guided bombshell of his own when he walked into the highly secured room on Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers on Pentagon concerns that the project was harmful, if not outright dangerous, to national security. He said he was pressured to alter his prepared testimony to say the project’s effects could be mitigated. …

Jennifer Rubin says John Boehner gave a speech on Israel she wishes the president would make.

In the nearly three years of the Obama administration — certainly the dreariest time in the history of U.S.-Israel relations — we’ve learned that presidents come and go (some quicker than others, we fervently hope), but the relationship between Congress and the American people, on one hand, and the government and people of Israel, on the other, is enduring. A high point in President Obama’s term was Prime Minister Benjamin’s Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress. It was, ironically and tragically, a repudiation of the U.S. president’s approach to Israel and exuberantly applauded by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

On Sunday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in direct, straightforward language confirmed the U.S.’s commitment to Israel in a speech at the Jewish National Fund’s 2011 National Convention in Cincinnati. In using simple, but not simplistic, language, Boehner’s speech (the handiwork of his excellent speechwriter Mike Ricci) eloquently conveyed that, in essence, this stuff is not hard to figure out: …

Bill McGurn says when it comes to trade deals, the president is owned by unions.

… Maybe that helps explain why—three years into his first term—Mr. Obama’s trade policy consists almost entirely of three trade deals his predecessor had already negotiated, and three weeks before Mr. Lee’s arrival the White House has still not sent the appropriate legislation on Korea up to Capitol Hill. Ironically, this presidential dithering comes at a time when these trade deals should be more attractive, given that the growing economies they represent would be healthy markets for our exports.

Korea’s economy, for example, is growing at an annual rate of more than 4%. Colombia’s is growing at more than 5%, and Panama’s is growing at more than 6%. Like the rest of the world, moreover, these nations are not standing still for Mr. Obama: Last week, for example, the Koreans and Colombians announced a bilateral free-trade agreement they expect to be done by year’s end.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When candidate Barack Obama went to Berlin in July 2008, his promise to the “people of the world” was that he would restore wisdom and sophistication to American leadership. When Mr. Lee shows up in Washington, it might be worth asking how he thinks it has turned out.

David Brooks says he was a “sap” for believing Obama.

I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap.

When the president said the unemployed couldn’t wait 14 more months for help and we had to do something right away, I believed him. When administration officials called around saying that the possibility of a double-dip recession was horrifyingly real and that it would be irresponsible not to come up with a package that could pass right away, I believed them.

I liked Obama’s payroll tax cut ideas and urged Republicans to play along. But of course I’m a sap. When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.

It recycles ideas that couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures.

We have a hat trick of Contentions posts by Peter Wehner.

In re-reading Monday’s speech by President Obama, several things stand out.

The first is its crass distortions. In his remarks in the Rose Garden, the president said, “If we’re not willing to ask those who’ve done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit … then the logic, the math says everybody else has to do a whole lot more: We’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor.” As others have pointed out, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes and the richest one percent pay more than 30 percent of their income to the federal government, while the average worker pays less than 14 percent. In addition, almost half of the public do not pay any income taxes at all. This is known as a progressive tax system. Now, one may argue the wealthy should pay even more than they do in taxes – but to pretend not embracing Obama’s plan would place the “entire” burden on the middle class and the poor isn’t “math”; it’s a massive distortion.

The second notable thing about Obama’s speech is its insight into the president’s state of mind. Obama has a deep, almost desperate, need to portray himself as the opposite of what he is. This appears to involve more than simple political considerations. Obama has an unusual capacity to conceive of himself in a way that is at odds with reality. And so the most profligate spender in history warns the rest of us about profligacy and not placing a debt burden “on our children’s shoulders.” The man on whose watch America amassed more than $4 trillion in debt says, “Washington has to live within its means.”  The president whose stimulus package was among the most wasteful and ineffective in history insists we have to “go through the budget line-by-line looking for waste.” The same individual who ridiculed Speaker Boehner for his “my way or the highway” approach then threatened, in the very same speech, to issue a veto unless he got his way. And the man who professes solidarity with the poor has seen poverty increase each year of his presidency, with a record number of people (46 million) now living in poverty. If that weren’t enough, Obama also wants to reduce the tax benefit for charitable giving.

Then there’s the fellow who lectured us yesterday about fighting for the middle class “as hard as the lobbyists and some lawmakers have fought to protect special treatment for billionaires and big corporations.” This admonition comes from the same fellow who presides over a White House that inappropriately pressured the Office of Management and Budget to approve half-billion dollars to a company, Solyndra, which wasn’t deserving of the money and has now gone belly up. The reason the money was fast-tracked and funneled to Solyndra was because its chief investor, George Kaiser, is a significant fundraiser for Obama. Kaiser, by the way, is a billionaire. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Leno: Good news for Obama. His approval overseas is very high, higher than at home. But then he’s created more jobs overseas than at home.

A little more late night humor from The Corner which leads to this.

As I have mentioned on countless occasions, I didn’t vote for Obama in 2008, but I did not dislike him personally. For all I knew, there could have been something to the imposing façade of leadership he put forward, and even an empty suit has a possibility of getting filled with something worthwhile; that was my hope; and, in any case, we would find out soon enough.

Well, we’ve found out. It’s a vindication both for those of us who voted for John McCain in the general and those of us who voted for Hillary in the primary. (I qualify on both counts). …

… I can guess what you must be thinking: another anti-Obama rant at NRO, basically a case of a minnow joining the dolphins at Sea World; leave it to the professionals, Mike. But I just want to be on record as a non-Obama-hater who deeply resents how this president has wasted America’s time and good will.

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Israel’s predicament by Bret Stephens.

What is Israel’s predicament? It is this: It is surrounded on nearly all sides by enemies who are aggressively committed to its destruction. And too many people who call themselves its friends are only ambivalently committed to its security.

Consider the month that Israel has just had:

• On Aug. 18, eight Israelis were killed in a sophisticated cross-border ambush near the frontier with Egypt.

• From Aug. 18-24, some 200 large-caliber, factory-made rockets and mortars were fired at Israel from Gaza. …

… No democracy in the world today lies under a darker shadow of existential dread than Israel. And the events of the past month ought to demonstrate that Israel’s dread is not of shadows only. Israel’s efforts to allay the enmity of its enemies or mollify the scorn of its critics have failed. But is it too much to ask its friends for support—this time, for once, without cavil or reservation?

Spengler catches Arabs being Arabs.

Now Egypt has banned the export of palm fronds, whose ritual use is central to the observance of the Jewish Feast of Sukkoth (Tabernacles). Most American Jews ignore this holiday, one of the three pilgrimage festivals (along with Passover and Shavuot) for which all the men of ancient Israel came to Jerusalem. For observant Jews, though, Sukkoth recreates the liturgy of the Temple and embodies our hope for its restoration. According to press accounts, the Egyptian Agriculture Ministry gave no reason for the ban. Israel is sourcing palm fronds elsewhere.

The reason for Egypt’s ban is obvious: the Islamists who are taking Egypt over by stages hate Judaism–not just the Jewish State, and not just the Jewish people, but the religion itself.  By extension, they hate Christianity.

As I explain in my new book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too), Islam asserts the Election of the Arabs in opposition to the Election of Israel. The Jewish religion itself is an affront to Islam, except, of course, when the Arabs can chant, “The Jews are our dogs,” permitting them to practice Judaism under conditions of humiliation and oppression. This silly, petty, pointless act of religious hatred speaks volumes about the character of the new Egyptian regime and the devolution of Egyptian society.

Jonathan Tobin says the coming UN disaster is Obama’s fault. Pickerhead thinks its the fault of the fools who voted for him.

For many liberal pundits, the blame for the circus that will unfold this week at the UN with the start of a debate over Palestinian statehood is to be assigned to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu whom they wrongly claim has obstructed peace talks. Others are inclined, with more justice, to put the onus for the problem on Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas whose pursuit of UN recognition of statehood without first making peace with Israel is seen as both futile and counter-productive to the end that he claims to seek.

But the lion’s share of the blame ought to fall on President Obama. Though peace talks were stalled when he took office in January 2009, the deterioration of a relatively stable standoff into the volatile situation that exists today is due in no small measure to the blunders that the president’s team has committed over the past 32 months. Though friends of Israel will rightly give Obama credit for sticking to his word and vetoing the Palestinian resolution — a stand that will be undertaken as much if not more in defense of U.S. interests than those of the Jewish state — the diplomatic disaster that is about to be played out is the fruit of his own misjudgments. …

Speaking of fools who voted for Obama, here’s Ed Koch and why, now, he’s gonna keep Barack’s feet to the fire.

When Gov. Cuomo announced there would be a special election in the 9th Congressional District to replace Anthony Weiner, I gave public voice to an idea that had been percolating in my head for some time. As everyone now knows, I wound up strongly supporting the candidacy of Bob Turner, who last week won the seat in a hotly contested race.

I want to explain why I did what I did, so there’s no misunderstanding of my intentions, or of my future plans. I hope President Obama gets the message that’s been sent. If he does — and if he announces, for example, that an attack by Turkey (which is heading toward war with Israel) or an attack by Egypt (which allowed the mob to occupy the Israeli embassy and threaten Israeli diplomats) would be seen as an attack upon the United States — I’d be happy to support him and even campaign in Florida on his behalf in 2012.

But if he doesn’t read the tea leaves and change his position, you can be certain I will continue to bang my drum. I will campaign against him not only in New York, but in other parts of the country next year. I’ll be loud and clear about what I believe. There are many Floridians who are concerned about the Obama administration’s treatment of Israel, and Florida will be crucial to the President’s reelection. …

Peter Schiff testified before Congress on how the government could create jobs. His testimony is here.

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking member, and all distinguished members of this panel. Thank you for inviting me here today to offer my opinions as to how the government can help the American economy recover from the worst crisis in living memory.

Despite the understandable human tendency to help others, government spending cannot be a net creator of jobs. Indeed many efforts currently under consideration by the Administration and Congress will actively destroy jobs. These initiatives must stop. While it is easy to see how a deficit-financed government program can lead to the creation of a specific job, it is much harder to see how other jobs are destroyed by the diversion of capital and resources. It is also difficult to see how the bigger budget deficits sap the economy of vitality, destroying jobs in the process.

In a free market jobs are created by profit seeking businesses with access to capital. Unfortunately Government taxes and regulation diminish profits, and deficit spending and artificially low interest rates inhibit capital formation. As a result unemployment remains high, and will likely continue to rise until policies are reversed.

It is my belief that a dollar of deficit spending does more damage to job creation than a dollar of taxes.   That is because taxes (particularly those targeting the middle or lower income groups) have their greatest impact on spending, while deficits more directly impact savings and investment. Contrary to the beliefs held by many professional economists spending does not make an economy grow. Savings and investment are far more determinative. Any program that diverts capital into consumption and away from savings and investment will diminish future economic growth and job creation.

Creating jobs is easy for government, but all jobs are not equal. Paying people to dig ditches and fill them up does society no good. On balance these “jobs” diminish the economy by wasting scarce land, labor and capital.  We do not want jobs for the sake of work, but for the goods and services they produce. As it has a printing press, the government could mandate employment for all, as did the Soviet Union. But if these jobs are not productive, and government jobs rarely are, society is no better for it. …

New Geography drills down into the Texas job numbers.

Texas Governor Rick Perry entered the Republican presidential nomination race bragging about the job creation record of Texas during his term as his primary pitch to a nation starved for jobs. This triggered a flurry of debate on whether or not Texas is really all Perry claims for it. But while there is certainly nuance in numbers, and Texas doesn’t win on every single measure, on the whole it seems indisputable that Texas did very, very well during the 2000s.

This may or may not be the doing of Perry. Nor are the national struggles clearly the fault of Obama. The  man at the top always reaps the credit for the blame for what happens on his watch, but the realities of the modern economy are quite complex and there’s only so much influence a governor or president has – and that usually comes with a lag. Nevertheless, the Texas story can’t simply be discounted.

Let’s take a look at the top level data. While reviewing, keep in mind that the data for the US as a whole actually includes Texas. If you stripped the Texas data out of the US total, the comparisons would generally get even better for the Lone Star State. …

Corner Post on how Michelle shakes down White House visitors.

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A Canadian comments on the American media. This from their National Post 

As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barrack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since.

Much of the Obama coverage was orchestrated sychophancy. They glided past his pretensions — when did a presidential candidate before “address the world” from the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin? They ignored his arrogance — “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” And they averted their eyes from his every gaffe — such as the admission that he didn’t speak “Austrian.”

Alana Goodman catches Axelrod complaining about Obama’s press coverage.

… Let’s see. Obama’s approval ratings are crashing and burning, new scandals are popping up daily, and his jobs plan is being widely panned by members of his own party. All that, and Axelrod still expects flattering coverage?

More than anything, the memo is a sign the media culture is beginning to change. Obama still gets far better coverage than a Republican politician would. But the rise of right-leaning media outlets and the competition for web traffic has made it much harder for mainstream outlets to ignore legitimate stories that reflect poorly on Democrats. That’s not to say the coverage of Obama’s campaign will be as fair and balanced as it should be, but he’s not going to get as much of a free pass as he did in 2008.

Mark Steyn thinks we’re pretty awesome when it comes to creating green jobs.

… On Thursday night, the president told a Democratic fundraiser in Washington that the Pass My Jobs Bill bill would create 1.9 million new jobs. What kind of jobs are created by this kind of magical thinking? Well, they’re “green jobs” – and, if we know anything about “green jobs,” it’s that they take a lot of green. German taxpayers subsidize “green jobs” in their wind-power industry to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars per worker per year: $250,000 per “green job” would pay for a lot of real jobs, even in the European Union. Last year, it was revealed that the Spanish government paid $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar panel assembly line. I had assumed carelessly that this must be a world record in terms of taxpayer subsidy per fraudulent “green job.” But it turns out those cheapskate Spaniards with their lousy nickel-and-dime “green jobs” subsidy just weren’t thinking big. The Obama administration’s $38.6 billion “clean technology” program was supposed to “create or save” 65,000 jobs. Half the money has been spent – $17.2 billion – and we have 3,545 jobs to show for it. That works out to an impressive $4,851,904.09 per “green job.” A world record! Take that, you loser Spaniards! USA! USA!

So, based on previous form, Obama’s prediction of 1.9 million new jobs will result in the creation of 92,000 new jobs, mostly in the Federal Department of Green Jobs Grant Applications. …

James Pethokoukis says Solyndra is the logical end of Obamanomics.

The bankruptcy of solar-panel maker Solyndra neatly encapsulates the economic, political and intellectual bankruptcy of Barack Obama’s Big Idea. It was the president’s intention back in 2009 to begin centrally reorganizing the U.S. economy around the supposed climate-change crisis.

To what end? Well, Obama claimed his election would mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” But that was just the cover story. At its core, Obamanomics is about the top-down redistribution of wealth and income. Government spending on various “green” subsidies and programs, along with a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions, would enrich key Democrat constituencies: lawyers, public sector unions, academia and non-profits.

Oh, and Wall Street, too. Who was the exclusive financial adviser to Solyndra when it was trying to secure the $535 million loan from Washington? Goldman Sachs. And had the cap-and-trade scheme been enacted, big banks stood ready to reap billions from the trading of carbon emission credits. …

Corner Post notes the political interests of a career “civil servant.”

… Today’s Washington Post has a story about how an OMB career official warned in an e-mail on January 31, 2011, that they needed “to flag to DOE at the highest levels the stakes involved” in Solyndra’s looming financial collapse. The e-mail does not show much concern over the potential loss to taxpayers of half a billion dollars. No, what concerns the supposedly nonpartisan career civil servant is the “optics” of such a loss due to the “PR and policy attention Solyndra has received since 2009.” The bureaucrat writes, “If Solyndra defaults down the road, the optics will arguably be worse later than they would be today.”

In fact, “the timing will likely coincide with the 2012 campaign season heating up, whereas a default today could be put in the context of (and perhaps even get some credit for) fiscal discipline/good government because the Administration would be limiting further taxpayer exposure letting bad projects go, and could make public steps it is taking to learn lessons and improve/limit future lending.” …

Jonah Goldberg reviews Obama’s weak week.

In Nevada, the Republican crushed a top-flight female Democratic candidate by 22 points. In New York, the seat that once belonged to Geraldine Ferraro, Chuck Schumer and Anthony Weiner went to Republican Bob Turner — the first time the seat since has gone Republican since 1923. A liberal strategist put a rosy spin on it: “The mine hasn’t collapsed, but the loss in New York is definitely a dead canary.”

In both races, the Democrats used their trump card: scaring seniors by telling them the GOP wants to take away their Medicare and Social Security. It didn’t work.

This came against a backdrop of abysmal poll numbers showing Obama’s approval falling with every constituency, including Democrats, Independents, Hispanics and African-Americans. That might be why congressional Democrats are openly balking at his must-pass stimulus do-over.

Corner Post quotes George Will.

“He went to Massachusetts to campaign against Scott Brown; Brown is now a senator. He went to New Jersey to campaign against Chris Christie, who’s now governor. He went to Virginia to campaign against Bob McDonnell, who’s now governor. He campaigned for the health-care plan extensively, it became less popular. He campaigned in 2010 for the Democrats, they were shellacked. He began, in a sense, his presidency flying to Copenhagen to get Chicago the Olympics; Chicago was the first city eliminated. There is no evidence that the man has the rhetorical powers that he is relying on.”

Another Corner Post quotes Karl Rove.

“President Obama has himself backwards,” Rove says. “His problem is not that he was a policy wonk: it’s that he wasn’t.  He refused to get his hands dirty writing a good stimulus bill, drafting bipartisan health-care reform, or negotiating with Republicans.  He found it easier to tell them ‘I won, so get lost.’”

“The president is comfortable with a technocratic approach because he is an imperious, arrogant, know-it-all left wing technocrat who leaves the details to his congressional Democratic allies, like Congressman Dave Obey with the stimulus bill,” Rove adds. “He is content to check the box on his list of achievements and tour the country with his teleprompter giving speeches.”

Peter Wehner comments on Obama’s claim to wonkishness.

There are two other things worth noting in what Obama said. The first is that he’s employing the old (and transparent) trick of criticizing himself by praising himself. The“disease” Obama suffers from, you see, is that he’s a “policy wonk.” The message the president is trying to send is he’s been too intellectual, too serious-minded, and too involved in mastering the depths of complicated policy issues; as a result, he just hasn’t paid enough attention to providing a “narrative” for his presidency. This is akin to the person who says his chief failure is that he hasn’t spent enough hosting Bible studies because he devotes a night a week to serving at the soup kitchen.

Maureen Dowd is doing her best beltway snobbery with comments on Rick Perry’s college and grades. Victor Davis Hanson says if grades are so important, why don’t the folks in the media go after the college grades of The One.

When Dowd trashes Perry and Bush (why not quote the hardly impressive Kerry record?), she is arguing that long ago college records and scores are a good barometer of presidential success (that is dubious if one were to compare a Lincoln or Truman to Wilson or Carter), and, by inference, that the current president is also apparent proof. But does she have inside information about the Obama undergraduate record at Occidental and Columbia? If not, why not, given the supposed importance of undergraduate grades to liberal observers? I suppose we are to conclude that supposedly poor students like a Perry or Bush released their grades or had them leaked, but brilliant undergraduates earning top slots at Harvard Law have no need to release obviously straight-A transcripts and no worry that anyone would care?

David (Miltonovich)* Friedman asks what’s so bad about global warming. *That would be “son of Milton.”

… the global warming controversy involves changes over not a year or a decade  but a century. Over a century, most farmers will change the crop they find it most profitable to grow multiple times; if average temperatures are trending up, those changes will include a shift towards crops better suited to slightly warmer weather. Over a century, most houses will be torn down and replaced; if sea level is rising, houses currently built on low lying coastal ground will be rebuilt a little farther inland—not much farther if we are talking, as the IPCC estimates suggest we should be, about a rise of a foot or two. Hence the presumption that change is bad is a very weak one for changes as slow as those we have good reason to expect from global warming.

It is hard to see any other reason to expect global warming to make us, on net, worse off. The earth and its climate were not, after all, designed for our convenience, so there is no good reason to believe that their current state is optimal for us. It is true that our species evolved to survive under then existing climatic conditions but, over the period for which humans have existed, climate has varied by considerably more than the changes being predicted for global warming. And, for the past many thousands of years, humans have lived and prospered over a range of climates much larger than the range that we expect the climate at any particular location to change by.

If we have no good reason to believe that humans will be substantially worse off after global warming than before, we have no good reason to believe that it is worth bearing sizable costs to prevent global warming.

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Andrew Ferguson profiles Rick Perry’s initiative’s in higher education.

If you want a glimpse of the way Rick Perry operates as an executive and a politician, consider the issue of higher education reform in Texas, which no one in Texas knew was an issue until Perry decided to make it one.

In his 30-year public career, Perry?—?how to put this delicately??—?has shown no sign of being tortured by a gnawing intellectual curiosity. “He’s not the sort of person you’ll find reading The Wealth of Nations for the seventh time,” said Brooke Rollins, formerly Perry’s policy director and now president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a free-market research group closely allied with Perry. At Texas A&M he majored in animal science and escaped with a grade point average a bit over 2.0. (Perry’s A&M transcript was leaked last month to the left-wing blog Huffington Post by “a source in Texas,” presumably not his mom. How his GPA compares with Barack Obama’s is unknown, since no one in higher education has thought to leak Obama’s transcript to a right-wing blog.)

Perry expends his considerable intelligence instead on using political power and, what amounts to the same thing, picking fights with his political adversaries. When Rollins came to Perry in 2007 with a radical and comprehensive proposal to overhaul higher education in the state, Rollins says the governor quickly understood the potential of the issue, not only politically but on its merits. …

… In late August, Perry scored another significant, if partial, victory. The University of Texas regents approved an “action plan” proposed by the system’s chancellor, who isn’t a Perry appointee. The plan is a compromise, but it incorporates many of Perry’s ideas, including some of the most radical, such as “pay for performance” and “learning contracts” between schools and their students. Amazingly, the plan has won support from both the right (Brooke Rollins’s Texas Public Policy Foundation) and left (Karen Hughes’s group). 

Reforms like these would have been unthinkable 10 years ago, before Perry picked up his stick and started poking the system until it had to respond. It’s been a remarkable display of political entrepreneurship: Create an issue, define it on your terms, cultivate public support, and your opponents, who never saw it coming, will have to go along, even if only partway?—?at first.

Victor Davis Hanson says the president’s quiver is empty.

Ex-president George W. Bush with accustomed candor once shrugged after the end of his eight-year presidency, “People were kind of tired of me.” That ennui happens eventually with most presidents. But in the case of Barack Obama, our modern Phaethon, his fiery crash is coming after 32, not 96, months.

We can sense the national weariness with Obama in a variety of strange and unexpected ways. There is the self-pitying anguish of liberal columnists who scapegoat him for turning the public against their own leftwing agenda. The current silence of “moderate” Republicans and conservative op-ed writers who once in near ecstasy jumped ship to join Obama is deafening. A growing number of Democratic representatives and senators up for reelection do not want their partisan president to visit their districts in the runup to November 2012. Approval ratings hover around 40 percent.

Perhaps strangest of all, there is now a collective “Been there, done that” any time Barack Obama walks up to the podium to give yet another teleprompted speech. …

Jennifer Rubin says now Dems are turning on Obama.

… When a president is failing, he acquires new troubles. Obama surely exemplifies this phenomenon. Obama’s jobs plan is now under assault from his own party. It sort of messes up his plan to run against the “do nothing” Republicans when Democrats mercilessly attack the plan.

The problems will soon multiply for Obama, as they do with any president who is on the ropes. How will he hold his troops in line for the remainder of his term? He won’t for now it is every man for himself. Can he expect Senate Democrats to block every effort from the House Republicans? Not if the red state Democrats want to win re-election.

It also poses some tricky problems for the 2012 campaign. What Democratic congressman in a swing state wants to be seen with him? …

Corner Post catches this on a Solyndra website;

“The leadership and actions of President Barack Obama, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the U.S. Congress were instrumental in concluding this offer for a loan guarantee,” said Solyndra CEO and founder, Dr. Chris Gronet. “The DOE Loan Guarantee Program funding will enable Solyndra to achieve the economies of scale needed to deliver solar electricity at prices that are competitive with utility rates. This expansion is really about creating new jobs while meaningfully impacting global warming.”

Michael Barone posts on Solyndra.

One factor favoring President Obama’s re-election, according to a recent article by political scientist Alan Lichtman, is the absence of scandal in his administration.

Lichtman may have spoken too soon.

The reason can be capsulized in a single word: Solyndra.

That’s the name of a company that manufactured solar panels in Fremont, Calif. (which voted 71 percent for Obama in 2008).

Solyndra was the first company to receive a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy as part of the 2009 stimulus package. This wasn’t small potatoes. The loan guarantee was for $535 million.

It was, Vice President Biden said, “exactly what the Recovery Act was all about.” Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner, said it would help “spark a new revolution that will put Americans to work.” It was part of the Obama administration’s program to create so-called “green jobs,” which we were told were the key to future economic growth. …

Allahpundit at Hot Air says the White House ignored three warnings about Solyndra.

That’s not all they ignored, either. According to e-mails obtained by the AP, one White House official who helped plan Obama’s big photo op at the plant earlier this year dismissed a news story about Solyndra’s financial troubles with, “Seems B.S.” A few months earlier, the same chump ignored the alarm bells being rung by accounting firms and instead accepted at face value Solyndra’s assurances that they were doing well, writing, “Fantastic to hear that business is doing well — keep up the good work! We’re cheering for you.”

Everyone knew the company was toast. Except the people in charge of your money. ”’

Alana Goodman says the administration has created green jobs at a cost of $5.5 million per job.

… The administration has already spent half of the initial $38.6 billion loan guarantees, which would be around $19.3 billion. And it’s “created” 3,500 jobs – at a cost of roughly $5.5 million per job. Numbers like these explain why Obama has been relatively quiet on “clean energy” funding during his latest jobs push. Notice it hasn’t been popping up in his speeches lately. Obama’s getting attacked by environmental groups for it, but politically it’s his only option.

And for the White House, there couldn’t be a worse time for this information to come out. August wasn’t a kind month to Obama, but his jobs plan isn’t saving him from a September that’s shaping up to be even worse. As James Carville advised earlier today, “What should the White House do now? One word came to mind: Panic.”

James Pethokoukis explains how the “stimulus” and “jobs act” really work.

The point of President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act is, well, to create jobs. And the sooner the better, right? Unemployment is above 9 percent, and everyone from Wall Street to the Congressional Budget Office to the White House now thinks that number isn’t going to improve anytime soon. Thus Obama’s new $450 billion stimulus plan. But since this new proposal is structured just like 2009?s $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it should be no surprise that it contains many of the same flaws as Stimulus 1.0….

Good News! Andrew Malcolm says Dennis “the menace” Kucinich may loose his house seat.

Well, it looks like the new congressional redistricting will help Ohio get rid of at least one long-term Democratic representative in next year’s House elections.

According to newly drawn district lines set to go to the Ohio Legislature any day, eight-term Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland and 15-term Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo are both in the same new narrow district running along the southern Lake Erie shoreline. Both have announced their candidacies.

The Buckeye state is home to House Speaker John Boehner and is losing two of its current 18 House seats.

Corner Post says England is getting down on it’s bullies; especially those who call other kids, “broccoli heads.”

The Daily Mail reports that more than 20,000 British nursery and elementary schoolchildren ages 3–11 have been registered in a national database for uttering words perceived as “racist.”

Under anti-bullying laws, school authorities are required to report incidents of name calling to the Department for Education. One tyke was placed in the registry for calling another a “broccoli head.” Naturally, the bien pensants identified him as a budding Klansman. Thus branded, the information tracks the students to subsequent schools and may be accessed by future employers.

Think that’s a bit too 1984 for the U.S.? Think again. The U.S. Department of Education is seeking to expand its authority over school bullying and some proponents of the expansion seem to view the First Amendment as a minor impediment to bringing a British-style anti-bullying regime to America.

The U.S.Commission on Civil Rights will be issuing a report on the matter shortly. Kindly check out the dissents of Commissioners Gaziano, Heriot, and Kirsanow.