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David Warren alerts us to the threat coming from Turkey.

The greatest threat to the world’s peace, at this moment, comes from a man named Recip Tayyip Erdogan. He is the prime minister of Turkey, at the head of the Justice and Development Party (“AK,” from the Turkish). A former mayor of Istanbul, he was arrested and jailed when he publicly recited Islamist verses (“the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets are our bayonets,” etc.), in defiance of the old secularist, Ataturk constitution, which made it an offence to incite religious and racial fanaticism. …

… It was he who sent the “peace flotilla” to challenge Israel’s right to blockade Gaza (recognized under international law and explicitly by the U.N.). He made the inevitable violent result of that adventure into an anti-Israeli cause célèbre. He has now announced that the next peace flotilla will be accompanied by the Turkish navy.

This will put Israel in the position of either surrendering its right to defend itself, or firing on Turkish naval vessels. There is no way to overstate the gravity of this: Erdogan is manoeuvring to create a casus belli. …

… In other words, we are staring at the trigger for a genuine world war. With Recip Erdogan’s twitching finger on it.

David Goldman (Spengler) outlines the situation in Egypt.

Robert Musil’s Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften (“The Man Without Qualities”), one of the great novels of the past century, is a portrait of the Austrian early in 1914. The readers know that their silly world will come to a terrible end a few months later with the outbreak of war, but the protagonists do not. Musil published a first volume and spent the rest of his life trying to write a second, without success, for it is the sort of story that has no end except for the abyss.

Arab politics today has a Musil-like quality of unreality, for the conclusion will be the collapse of the Egyptian state. The misnamed “Arab Spring,” really a convulsion of a dying society, began with food shortages. Egypt imports half its caloric consumption, 45% of its people are illiterate, its university graduates are unemployable, its $10 billion a year tourism industry is shuttered for the duration, and its foreign exchange reserves are gradually disappearing. …

Roger Simon reports on the latest GOP debate.

They say it ain’t over ’til it’s over or the fat lady sings at least a dozen times, finally making all the high notes in Aida and La Traviata in succession. Nevertheless — after only his second debate — things do look pretty good for Rick Perry.

And consider before this Tampa debate he was already twelve points ahead of nearest rival Mitt Romney, according to its sponsor’s (CNN) own poll.

So it’s no surprise that most of Monday’s affair — which mostly reprised the same questions from last week’s Reagan Library debate (this all could get pretty tedious fast) — was a game of “Everybody on Rick” with the Texas governor, perhaps in deference to his state’s proximity to Mexico, as the designated piñata.

Well, not quite everybody. Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain declined to attack Perry. (I will try to explain that later.) But Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, and, of course, Romney did their best to slam Perry at every opportunity, sometimes remembering, seemingly as an afterthought, to throw in an unkind word for Barack Obama, as if the Texas governor and the not the president was the incumbent.

This week’s report on poverty in American must make the president wonder if he can ever get a break. Andrew Malcolm notes a study from the Heritage Foundation on the conditions of the poor.

… Forty percent live in apartments, less than 10% in mobile homes or trailers and about 50% live in standard one-family homes. In fact, 42% own their own home.

The vast majority are in good repair, with more living space per person than the average non-poor person in Britain, France or Sweden.

Ninety-six percent of poor parents say their children were never hungry during the year due to an inability to afford food.

Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning and 92% have a microwave.

One-third of poor households have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV, 70% have a VCR and two-thirds have satellite/cable TV, the same proportion as own at least one DVD player.

Half of the poverty households have a personal computer and one-in-seven have two or more. …

John Tierney visited the Monitor Center at the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News.

Military secrecy was a bit lax during the Civil War, by today’s standards, but contractor deadlines were a lot tighter.

The technology that revolutionized naval warfare began with a five-sentence message delivered to The New York Times 150 years ago, on Aug. 9, 1861, and the information was not exactly classified. It was an advertisement placed by the Union Navy, to appear the following six days, under the heading “Iron-Clad Steam Vessels.”

“The Navy Department will receive offers from parties who are able to execute work of this kind,” the ad announced, describing its desire for a two-masted ship “either of iron or of wood and iron combined. The plans had to be submitted by early September, giving designers less than a month.

Less than six months later, a shipyard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, launched not merely an ironclad but an entirely new kind of warship. The U.S.S. Monitor had no masts and no line of cannons. It was essentially a submarine beneath a revolving gun turret, something so tiny and bizarre-looking that many experts doubted the “cheese box on a raft” would float, much less fight.

But somehow it survived both the Navy bureaucracy and a broadside barrage to become one of the most celebrated ships in the world. Its designer and crew were the 19th-century celebrity equivalent of astronauts. Long after the ship sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the turret remained a cultural icon: an “armored tower” in Melville’s poetry, an image on book covers and film posters, a shape reproduced in items from toys to refrigerators.

Now the original turret, which was recovered from the ocean floor nine years ago and placed in a freshwater tank to protect it from corrosion, is on display again. It has been temporarily exposed to the air so that it can be scraped clean — very carefully, in front of museum visitors and a live webcam — by a team of researchers at the U.S.S. Monitor Center of the Mariners’ Museum here in Newport News. The team expects to have nearly all the barnacles and sediment removed by the end of this month, giving the public a new look at the dents from the Confederate cannonballs and shells that would have sunk any ordinary ship of its day. Then the turret will be submerged again in fresh water for 15 more years, until enough ocean salt has been removed from the metal to allow it to face the air permanently. …

A WSJ book review tells an amazing story of identical twins separated for almost 30 years

A Spanish mother gave birth to twin girls in 1973 at a hospital in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, but one of the babies was accidentally switched in the maternity unit. The mistake went undiscovered for nearly three decades. The mother assumed that she had given birth to fraternal twins (dizygotic, from two eggs) and not “identical” ones (monozygotic, two embryos developed from a single fertilized egg). The girl she named Begoña was her biological daughter; the baby named Beatriz was not.

As Nancy L. Segal relates in “Someone Else’s Twin,” her fascinating account of the switched-at-birth misstep and the painful family and legal entanglements that followed much later, an unexpected encounter in a clothing store was the tale’s turning point. A shop assistant mistook the 28-year-old Begoña for a person she knew named Delia. After Begoña explained who she was, the clerk—still struck by the resemblance—suggested that the two “doubles” meet each other. …

Popular Mechanics has the story on crowd counting mechanics.

On June 4, a huge crowd gathered in Hong Kong for a vigil to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. But just how huge? In some stories 77,000 people showed up. Another story, though, listed the attendance as nearly double that: 150,000.

There’s a reason for the disparity. The first figure—77,000—is a police estimate. The second is from the event’s coordinators, who probably had some motivation to pad their numbers. To find out which crowd size was correct, two professors—Paul Yip at the University of Hong Kong and Ray Watson at Melbourne University—ran the numbers. To fit 150,000 people into that space, they’d have to cram together at about one person per 2.7 square feet (four per square meter), so that estimate is unrealistic. That would be “mosh-pit density,” the researchers write in a new paper on crowd estimation techniques published in the journal Significance.

This story of competing head counts is not uncommon. Estimating large numbers is difficult even with the best of intention. If you count the number of jellybeans in a jar three times, you’ll probably have three different numbers, because people simply cannot count very large numbers without some error. Now, imagine trying to count a shifting mass of heads, some stooping to tie shoes, some sharing the same umbrella, some arriving late or leaving early. Plus, this is one field in which good intentions are rare. Crowd-size estimation is a murky science, positioned at the intersection of statistical precision and political sleight-of-hand, and plenty of people are motivated to either exaggerate or low-ball an event’s attendance.

“Almost everyone who has tried to make a crowd estimate has a vested interest in what the outcome of the estimate is,” Charles Seife says. Seife is a journalism professor at New York University who writes about math and physics. [Disclosure: I had a class with Seife at NYU.] His newest book Proofiness tackles the ways that people try to fool others (and sometimes fool themselves) with numbers. “Whenever you see a crowd estimate,” he says, “you have to wonder where it’s coming from.” Nevertheless, Seife says, if you do your math carefully, it is possible to count a large crowd to within a couple of tens of thousands. And researchers like Yip and Watson are now applying new strategies to find out whether it is indeed possible to get a more accurate count of a teeming mass of humanity. …

Christopher Hitchens in rare form.  

The other night, I was having dinner with some friends in a fairly decent restaurant and was at the very peak of my form as a wit and raconteur. But just as, with infinite and exquisite tantalizations, I was approaching my punch line, the most incredible thing happened. A waiter appeared from nowhere, leaned right over my shoulder and into the middle of the conversation, seized my knife and fork, and started to cut up my food for me. Not content with this bizarre behavior, and without so much as a by-your-leave, he proceeded to distribute pieces of my entree onto the plates of the other diners.

No, he didn’t, actually. What he did instead was to interrupt the feast of reason and flow of soul that was our chat, lean across me, pick up the bottle of wine that was in the middle of the table, and pour it into everyone’s glass. And what I want to know is this: How did such a barbaric custom get itself established, and why on earth do we put up with it?

There are two main ways in which a restaurant can inflict bad service on a customer. The first is to keep you hanging about and make it hard to catch the eye of the staff. (“Why are they called waiters?” inquired my son when he was about 5. “It’s we who are doing all the waiting.”) The second way is to be too intrusive, with overlong recitations of the “specials” and too many oversolicitous inquiries. A cartoon in The New Yorker once showed a couple getting ready for bed, with the husband taking a call and keeping his hand over the receiver. “It’s the maitre d’ from the place we had dinner. He wants to know if everything is still all right.” …

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John Podhoretz announces the GOP win of Anthony Weiner’s seat.

… These may prove to be among the most suggestive special-election results in modern American history. The Democratic candidate Harris Wofford?’s win in the 1991 special for Senate in Pennsylvania proved a harbinger of Bill Clinton?’s victory in 1992, and Republican Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts in January 2010 presaged the shellacking in the midterms last year. If Obama loses next November, the writing on the wall will have appeared tonight.

Stanley Kurtz writes about Ed Koch’s influence in NY-9.

Other than Barack Obama, no single person had a greater impact on the NY-9 race than Ed Koch. The economy and marriage issues were also key, of course, but Koch explicitly framed the election as an attempt to send a message to Obama on Israel.

This March 2010 post from Ron Radosh helps make sense of Koch’s decision. Koch is a centrist Democrat, hawkish on defense and supportive of Israel. Like Joe Lieberman, Koch represents the Democratic party of an earlier day. Because of the War on Terror, Koch broke ranks in 2004 to support President Bush’s re-election campaign. Yet unlike Lieberman, who endorsed McCain in 2008, Koch campaigned enthusiastically for Obama in 2008. In Florida that year, Koch assured Jewish voters that Obama would be a strong friend of Israel. Koch also dismissed Republican attempts to cast doubt on Obama’s commitment to Israel as unfounded and hysterical. …

Tony Blankley warns against the left’s new violent speech. The Wisconsin teacher’s union intimidation tactics turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. 

In the past few weeks, leading Democrats in Congress have called Tea Party members terrorists, said they should go to hell and accused them of wanting to lynch black people. Last weekend at an event attended by President Obama, the head of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., attacked the Tea Party, screaming, “President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these sons of bitches [Tea Party members] out and give America back to an America where we belong.” (Note: The president was not on the platform when Mr. Hoffa spoke.)

So far, neither the president nor any prominent Democrat has condemned such remarks – even though the phrase “take out” is commonly used to describe an act of criminal homicide. Thus, Mr. Hoffa’s statement might rise to the level of incitement to violence. …

Thomas Sowell looks at last week’s jobs speech.

… When it comes to specific proposals, President Obama repeats the same kinds of things that have marked his past policies — more government spending for the benefit of his political allies, the construction unions and the teachers’ unions, and “thousands of transportation projects.”

The fundamental fallacy in all of this is the notion that politicians can “grow the economy” by taking money out of the private sector and spending it wherever it is politically expedient to spend it — so long as they call spending “investment.”

Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy.

Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now.

Obama says he wants “federal housing agencies” to “help more people refinance their mortgages.” What does that amount to in practice, except having the taxpayers be forced to bail out people who bought homes they could not afford?

No doubt that is good politics, but it is lousy economics. …

FuelFix blog with more on Solyndra. 

Solyndra LLC’s workers making solar-power panels in a California factory subsidized by U.S. taxpayers showed “the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith,” President Barack Obama said on a visit to the company in May 2010.

Two months before Obama’s visit, accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP warned that Solyndra, the recipient of $535 million in federal loan guarantees, had financial troubles deep enough to “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

The Obama administration stood by Solyndra through the auditor’s warning, the abandonment of a planned initial public offering and a last-ditch refinancing where taxpayers took a back seat to new investors. That unwavering commitment has come under increasing scrutiny since the company’s travails culminated in its filing for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6 and a raid on its headquarters by the Federal Bureau of Investigation two days later.

“People including our government put blinders on and did not want to believe in the obvious,” Jonathan Dorsheimer, an analyst in Boston for Canaccord Genuity Inc. of Vancouver, said in an interview with Bloomberg Government. “The fact that the government chose Solyndra as their white horse is mind-boggling.” …

Andrew Ferguson explains how the media spins BS.

I’ve spent much of my summer trying to dodge Mark Zandi. I pick up my newspaper, I turn on the TV, I tap-tap my iPad, and there he is: explaining the past, divining the future, teasing insights from the tumultuous present. It’s his job. Zandi is not a pundit, exactly. He’s an economist by trade. What he really is, is a go-to guy, one of the most successful go-to guys in journalism history. The need for go-to guys is never less than acute, but this summer, with the failing economy and the debt-ceiling debate, demand has been particularly brisk.

Here’s how the go-to guy works. Let’s say you’re a reporter on a deadline and you need a quote right this minute about how Republicans have rendered Congress dysfunctional. Well then, your go-to guy is Norman Ornstein?, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Perhaps you want to give readers a little historical perspective, something eggheady about, say, how smoothly leaders of both parties used to work together before the lunatics (you know who they are) started running the asylum on Capitol Hill?? Quick: get “presidential historian” Douglas Brinkley on the phone before he goes live on the NewsHour! He’ll be sure to tell you, with a wistful air, that Tip O’Neill and President Reagan? were always friends after five o’clock.

If it’s the economy you’re writing about, it’s Mark Zandi. He has all the qualities that go into making a go-to guy of the very first rank. He is fluent on television and keeps his sentences short. His demeanor is pleasant. He uses the word “narrative” with abandon—“narrative” being the hottest word in journalism since “transparency”; it’s this year’s “accountability.” And he’s a liberal. All go-to guys are liberals. They can’t be identified as such, lest their authority as disinterested observers be undermined and the reader or viewer begin to get ideas. Ideological fuzziness is good; ideological hermaphroditism is better.

Ornstein, for example, is a moderate liberal, but the think tank that employs him is conservative: the politics of the one combines with the politics of the other to make a purely objective go-to guy who can offer liberal opinions without the label. Douglas Brinkley’s liberalism is deep and abiding, made explicit, to cite one instance, when he published a panting campaign biography of John Kerry in 2003. Yet he has also been chosen, inexplicably, to edit various editions of the papers of Ronald Reagan by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. Reagan breeds with Kerry and Go-To Brinkley is born, a scholar who plays it straight down the middle, listing leftward.

In economics, Zandi is capable of meeting all of a reporter’s go-to-guy needs, so the trade has been careful in obscuring his liberalism. He is a registered Democrat, as he freely admits when asked. But he’s seldom asked. The key to his indispensability is that he once—once—did some work for a Republican. Early in the 2008 presidential campaign, one of John McCain’s economics advisors enlisted Zandi to file a weekly analysis of current economic data for the campaign’s use. He never advised McCain on matters of policy, he never met McCain, and he was never paid for his labor. The real payout, in fame and influence, came after the election.

Why a story about clamming on Long Island? Because digging clams was how Pickerhead earned money in his early teens before he was work legal. And it was on the North Shore of Long Island – Conscience Bay in Setauket, NY. A bushel was worth $11. $14 if I could catch someone going across the Sound to Bridgeport, Conn. where rivers were polluted. We get this story from Gilt Taste blog.

Every summer, my wife, son, and I pay a visit to our friend Elena and her daughters, who rent a house in Orient, on the North Fork of Long Island.

The idea in going there, apparently, is to relax. To do nothing. It’s beautiful, it’s wonderful, and… I kind of dread it, because I am not good at this. At all. I’m a restless sort. My need to move and do tends to contaminate the tranquility, and I hate to kill a (lazy) buzz.

I need a goal. A project. Something beach-y to keep my occupied, and this year, I decided my project would be clamming. Growing up in Florida, I learned two things: (1) there’s nothing in the world better than seafood you’ve pulled from the water yourself, and (2) half a day on a fishing boat will get me sunburn and seasickness with far more certainty than it will get me fish. Clams, they don’t swim away. Clamming was the perfect answer, I thought. Relaxing, yet productive, undeniably beach-y, and with the promise of pristine seafood at the end.

Having never clammed before, a bit of research was in order. I searched Twitter and hit paydirt immediately: Alec Baldwin, Long Island native, apparent guru of all things, was just then guiding actress Ali Wentworth in the finer points of the art: …

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Watching the 911 stuff made Mark Steyn a little grumpy.

Waiting to be interviewed on the radio the other day, I found myself on hold listening to a public service message exhorting listeners to go to 911day.org and tell their fellow citizens how they would be observing the tenth anniversary of the, ah, “tragic events.” There followed a sound bite of a lady explaining that she would be paying tribute by going and cleaning up an area of the beach.

Great! Who could object to that? Anything else? Well, another lady pledged that she “will continue to discuss anti-bullying tactics with my grandson.”

Marvelous. Because studies show that many middle-school bullies graduate to hijacking passenger jets and flying them into tall buildings?

Whoa, ease up on the old judgmentalism there, pal. In New Jersey, many of whose residents were among the dead, middle-schoolers will mark the anniversary with a special 9/11 curriculum that will “analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history.” And, if the “9/11 Peace Story Quilt” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art teaches us anything, it’s that the “tragic events” only underline the “importance of respect.” And “understanding.” As one of the quilt panels puts it:

“You should never feel left out

You are a piece of a puzzle

And without you

The whole picture can’t be seen.” …

Pittsburgh’s Jack Kelly says Obama and the unions are tanking together.

… the big things labor wants — card check, a bailout of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp., massive pork barrel projects — are out of reach. With GOP control of the House, the outlook even for “little nibbly things” is cloudy.

Labor’s problems stem from our massive debt and dismal economy. They are exacerbated by thuggish behavior, and by the unwillingness of unions to tighten their belts as other Americans must.

President Obama is polling in Jimmy Carter territory. Unions are less popular now than in many decades. Mutual weakness will draw Democrats and unions closer, despite labor’s discontents. But the closer to each other they get, the more swing voters will recoil from both.

Jennifer Rubin posts that the president says, “Do it my way, do it now, and we’ll pay for it later.”

President Obama took to the Rose Garden today, apparently unaware that his public appearances these days annoy and bore Americans rather than persuade them. (Actually, his skills of persuasion have never been robust, on any issue.)

Today he demanded: “On Thursday, I told Congress that I’ll be sending them a bill called the American Jobs Act. Well, here it is. This is a bill that will put people back to work all across the country. This is the bill that will help our economy in a moment of national crisis. This is a bill that is based on ideas from both Democrats and Republicans. And this is the bill that Congress needs to pass. No games. No politics. No delays. I’m sending this bill to Congress today, and they ought to pass it immediately.” His contempt for Congress runneth over. …

So, what do Huntsman and Obama have in common? Besides the fact that neither one will be nominated by the GOP. Debra Saunders says they both worship science.

… Consider Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winning physicist. In 2009, Chu’s staff approved $535 million loan guarantee to the Fremont solar company, Solyndra. Within two years, despite half a billion in taxpayer dollars, Solyndra announced last week it was filing for bankruptcy, shuttering its remaining plant, and laying off 1,100 workers. That was one miscalculation. Mistakes happen.

But the biggest blunder was not made by a scientist, but by a politician who so trusted the hollow promises of the climate-change lobby that he bet the U.S. economy on green jobs that never did proliferate. That was President Obama, and you see the fruit of his misguided faith.

Forbes contributor Charles Kadlec writes on the great African American depression.

… No group has suffered more than individuals within the black community.  Nearly 400,000 fewer blacks are employed today than in February 2009, and their unemployment rate has shot up a gut-wrenching 3.1 percentage points to 16.7%.  By contrast, white unemployment rates are up only one-half a percentage point to 8.0%.

The comparison would look even worse except that black participation rates have fallen to 60.4% from 63.1%.  If participation rates had stayed where they were, black unemployment rate today would stand at 18.8%.

Even worse, black teenage unemployment now stands at an unconscionable 46.5%. That’s right, nearly half of all black teenagers seeking employment do not have a job.

Too often liberals ignore their policy failures by insisting on their good intentions.  But, not even good intentions can excuse the disparate impact the policies championed by the Congressional Black Caucus in particular, and Democrats and liberals in general, have had on the black community.

The anti-discrimination laws that rule the workplace provide a relevant standard for assessing any Administration’s economic policies. Under the law, the consequences of employment practices without regard to motive are what matter.

Using this standard, Republicans should challenge Democrats based on the consequences their policies have had on Americans in general, and on minorities in particular.  No matter its motive, the Obama Administration’s strategy of increasing the size and scope of government in the name of fairness and safety has had a disparate impact on black workers.  The apparent tolerance of high black unemployment as collateral damage on the road to the liberal vision of a “more just society” is itself intolerable. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Leno: President Obama named his new $447-billion legislation the American Jobs Act. Better than the original name, the Save My Ass Act.

Letterman: Don’t forget, folks, tomorrow is take your son or daughter with you to the Unemployment Office Day.

Leno: Government statistics show the U.S. economy created zero jobs in August. President Obama now says he’s confident this month he can double that.

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Deroy Murdock compares two presidents.

President Zero.

The brand-new nickname for Barack ObamAA+ symbolizes America’s total net jobs created in August: Zippo.

So, how many jobs emerged in August 1983, the analogous point in Ronald Reagan’s presidency? 280,000. Proportional to today’s population, that equals 367,360 new hires last month.

Citizens pondering Obama’s latest jobs speech and how to get America working again should focus on today’s great Keynesian experiment. Ronald Reagan’s supply-side mixture of tax cuts, deregulation, and sound money competes directly against Obama’s big-government blend of Keynesian stimuli, rampant red tape, and promiscuous printing of money — as if dollars were wallpaper. The late Reagan trounces the leisurely Obama. …

Barton Hinkle lays out the case against Solyndra-like government loans.

… The Solyndra story encapsulates a much bigger issue than mere crony capitalism, bad as that is. Because Solyndra is not alone. The Obama administration has sunk billions into loan guarantees for dozens of other renewable-energy companies as well.

This is known as the political allocation of economic resources, and it entails all kinds of problems. The first and most basic: It’s wrong. Government should not be picking winners and losers in the marketplace.

Problem No. 2: corruption. When government puts its massive thumb on the market scale, corporations have a huge incentive to try to win government’s favor. Hence: campaign contributions and lobbyists galore. Progressives who want to keep money out of politics should help libertarians build a high wall between economy and state.

Problem No. 3: the distortion of market incentives. Although federal policy was far from the only reason for the recent housing bubble and crash, it played a significant role. And even when market intervention does not produce a crash, it can still produce a creature like the Chevy Volt—an electric vehicle for which there is zero demand despite a whopping $7,500 federal tax credit for purchase—or Cash for Clunkers. That idea, now universally derided, seemed bright at the time, at least to some. In retrospect, it seems as smart as paying people to burn down their houses to stimulate demand for new ones.

Such market distortion shifts resources from more productive to less productive purposes, which inevitably produces less prosperity—fewer jobs at lower pay. Want evidence? See last month’s New York Times story “Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises,” which concluded: “Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show.” For the Times to concede that government intervention in pursuit of progressive political goals has not worked is like National Review criticizing a Republican. The proof has to be overwhelming. …

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor looks at Solyndra and part of their financing.

… I want to focus on a narrower issue.  Remember in 2009, when the secured creditors of Chrysler were expropriated (that’s a nice way to say “hosed”) when that company went into bankruptcy?  Their purportedly senior claims were in fact subordinated to junior, unsecured creditors.  The secured creditors were the subject of vitriolic criticism from Obama personally, and from the administration and its media water boys.  It was an early indicator of the crony capitalism to come.

In the Solyndra case, a major Obama bundler George Kaiser–from very red-state Oklahoma, of all places–is an investor in Solyndra.  More to the point, when the company was in trouble back in March, it borrowed $75 million dollars, in part from the George Kaiser Family Foundation.   Crucially, this loan was made senior to most of the outstanding debts owed to the Federal government ($385 million out of the $535 million in total provided by Uncle Sucker).

So it will be quite interesting to see whether Kaiser, the Obama donor, gets the Chrysler secured creditor treatment, or whether the administration will have found a strange new respect for the virtues of strict adherence to priority rules in bankruptcy.

Speaking of Solyndra, Craig also points out the foolishness of the loan.

… The incompetence alternative gets a boost from Nobel Prize winning Secretary of Energy Chu.  DOE’s Inspector General participated in the raid, but Chu apparently thinks that Solyndra is a success.  Yes.  You read that right.  A success:

Mr. Chu’s spokesman argued that “the project that we supported succeeded. The facility was producing the product it said it would produce, and consumers were buying the product.”

Then I guess every firm filing through bankruptcy court is really a success.  Chu is obviously a brilliant physicist and an economic numbskull.  Which wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.

Seeing what has transpired with the spawn of the first stimulus, by all means, let’s “pass the bill” so we can watch Son of Stimulus.  By Chu’s standards, it’s guaranteed to be a smashing success.

ABC News has been doing much of the heavy lifting in Solyndra-gate. 

Federal agents have expanded their examination of the now-bankrupt California solar power company Solyndra, visiting the homes of the company’s CEO and two of its executives, examining computer files and documents, iWatch News and ABC News have learned.

Agents visited the homes of CEO Brian Harrison and company founder Chris Gronet and a former executive, according to a source who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the legal sensitivity of the situation.

Gronet, reached at his home Friday morning, did not dispute that his home was visited by federal agents a day earlier.

“I’m sorry,” Gronet said, “you probably understand full well that I cannot comment.” The third executive could not be immediately reached.

Solyndra spokesman David Miller confirmed agents visited Harrison’s home on the same day the FBI and Energy Department Inspector General seized boxes of records from the company’s headquarters.

“Yeah, they did go to his house and speak to him briefly,” Miller said. “I don’t know what they may have taken. I believe they took a look at his computer.” …

Peter Wehner writes on the fall.

… As Jimmy Carter can tell you, for a president to become an object of disdain and apathy is a very dangerous place to find himself.

It has been a stunning fall from grace for Obama, a man who, upon taking office, was routinely compared to Kennedy, to FDR, and even to Lincoln. One is tempted to say those comparisons were unfair to Obama, except that he did so much to invite them.

By now, the cult-like effect Obama had on his supporters is a distant, fading memory. The Greek columns built for his convention speech now look simply silly, as does Obama’s promise to heal the earth and reverse the ocean tide. His core appeal was aesthetic, and hence fleeting. It turns out Obama really was best equipped to be a community organizer and a state senator and perhaps not very much more than that. But Obama, a man of extraordinary self-regard, decided he was the world-historical person we had been waiting for. (What can one say about a person who surrounded himself with aides who referred to him as “Black Jesus” during the campaign?)

In a coincidence that calls to mind William Blake’s “fearful symmetry” phrase, it was also Dana Milbank who in July 2008, months before Obama was elected, reported  that Obama attended an “adoration session” with Democratic lawmakers in the Cannon Caucus Room, where even committee chairmen arrived early, “as if for the State of the Union.”

Inside, according to a witness, Obama told the House members, “This is the moment…that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

Some of us warned at the time that any man who believes he is “the moment that the world is waiting for” and views himself as “the symbol of the possibility and best traditions of America” is an individual of staggering arrogance. …

Michael Barone reviews the jobs speech.

What is there to say about Barack Obama’s speech to Congress Thursday night and the so-called American Jobs Act he said Congress must pass? Several thoughts occur, all starting with P.

Projection. That’s psychologist-speak term for projecting your own faults on others. “This isn’t political grandstanding,” Obama told members of Congress, as Republicans snickered (but thankfully resisted the temptation to shout, “You lie!”). “This isn’t class warfare.” …

Instapundit, Ed Morrissey, and Legal Insurrection post on Obama’s Lincoln mistake last week.

By this time, Barack Obama should know better than to go off the TelePrompter. In the text of the speech last night given to a joint session of Congress, Obama was supposed to make a single reference to Abraham Lincoln:

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future – a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges.

Unfortunately, Obama felt the need to take a partisan shot at his opposition, and in doing so, offered up a historic flub (via Greg Hengler):

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party.

Er, not quite. Lincoln wasn’t even the GOP’s first Presidential nominee; …

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Corner Post with electrifying news about the special congressional election in Queens next week. You know, the seat that once was the location of Anthony’s Weiner.

Republican Bob Turner holds a commanding lead of six points in the latest poll in the special election to fill Anthony Weiner’s seat, conducted independently by Siena College. Crucially, he also now has 50 percent of the electorate, leading Democrat David Weprin 50-44.

Previous polls had shown him in the lead, but were potentially biased by GOP ties. This is a remarkable reversal; the last Siena poll, from August 15, placed Weprin six points ahead (though even this was considered a strong Republican showing in such a blue district). …

John Podhoretz has more on the vote in Queens.

We’ve been writing here all week about the stunning possibility that a conservative Republican named Bob Turner will upset a liberal Democrat named David Weprin in the special election Tuesday to fill Anthony Weiner’s Brooklyn/Queens district, which has a 3-to-1 Democratic registration advantage. It’s the most Jewish district in the country, and a great many of its Jews are religious Jews. In choosing Weprin to run for the seat, Democrats thought the fact that he sports a kippah would carry the day with his fellow Orthodox Jews.

It’s not happening that way, and even the notion that it would testifies to the ignorance of pols, including Jewish pols, who think religious Jews are like other ethnic voters. Weprin may be an Orthodox Jewish Democrat, but as such he is now actually in the minority among Orthodox Jews. And the commonality of their religious practice apparently does not provide sufficient cover for his being a representative of the Democratic party in the age of Obama. …

James Pethokoukis posts on the “jobs” address.

There’s been much speculation that President Barack Obama will spend $1 billion to get reelected. Turns out those guesses were off by $446 billion.

What Americans heard last night was a $447 billion political plan, not an economic one. It’s purpose was to a) fire up the demoralized Democratic base and b) show independents that Obama is trying to do something – anything – to reduce unemployment, not just slash needed “investment” like those heartless, pro-austerity Republicans. …

Michael Barone on Thursday’s speech.

Barack Obama looked and sounded angry in his speech to the joint session of Congress. He bitterly assailed one straw man after another and made reference to a grab bag of proposals which would cost something on the order of $450 billion—assuring us on the one hand that they all had been supported by Republicans as well as Democrats in the past and suggesting that somehow they are going to turn the economy around. He called for further cuts in the payroll tax (which if continued indefinitely would undermine the case of Social Security as something people have earned rather than a form of welfare) and for a further extension of unemployment insurance (perhaps justifiable on humanitarian grounds, but sure to at least marginally raise the unemployment rate over what it would otherwise be). He called for a tax credit for hiring the long-term unemployed (unfortunately, these things can be gamed). He gave a veiled plug for his pet project of high-speed rail (a real dud) and for infrastructure spending generally (but didn’t he learn that there aren’t really any shovel-ready projects?). He called for a school modernization program (will it result in more jobs than the Seattle weatherization program that cost $22 million and produced 14 jobs?) and for funding more teacher jobs (a political payoff to the teacher unions which together with other unions gave Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle). “We’ll set up an independent fund to attract private dollars and issue loans based on two criteria: how badly a construction project is needed and how much good it would do for the country.” Yeah, sure. Like the screening process that produced that $535,000,000 loan guarantee to now-bankrupt Solyndra. And Congress should pass the free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea. Except that Congress can’t, because Obama hasn’t sent them up there yet in his 961 days as president.

Obama assured us that this would all be paid for. But as far as I could gather, he punted that part of it to the supercommittee of 12 members set up under the debt ceiling bill. He now blithely charges it with coming up with more than its current goal of $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Oh, and he’s going to announce “a more ambitious deficit plan” that will “stabilize our debt in the long run”–11 days from now. …

Barone does a good job explaining the ways we changed 10 years ago today.

Dec. 7, 1941. Nov. 22, 1963. Sept. 11, 2001. All of us old enough to remember know exactly where we were and what we were doing when we first heard the awful news. We remember the stunning feeling that suddenly everything had changed, that nothing would be the same. We remember feeling that unknown horrors lay ahead.

Ten years after Pearl Harbor, the United States was mired in a stalemated war in Korea. But the nation had won a great victory in World War II, embarked on a generation of postwar prosperity, and confronted the Soviet Union in a Cold War that would take four decades to win.

Ten years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the United States went through a wrenching debate on the war in Vietnam and had a president mired in the scandal known as Watergate. But the nation had also passed landmark civil rights legislation, embarked on a war against poverty and landed the first men on the moon.

Ten years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the changes are less dramatic and less resolved, but they touch Americans every day. Airport pat-downs, barricades outside government offices, identification checks at private buildings, searches at sports stadiums, armed security officers at public events, long motorcades with Secret Service SUVs and police outriders — all these are the legacy of 9/11.

On Sept. 10, 2001, America was on a decade long holiday from history. We were, as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “the indispensable nation,” seemingly without any serious enemies. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 signaled with more clarity than is usual in history the end of the Cold War. We had mostly harmonious relations with Russia and our economy was increasingly intertwined with China’s.

It was a decade with fewer military conflicts and deaths than any for more than a century. And where America did intervene militarily, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, it did so without committing appreciable numbers of ground troops or incurring significant numbers of casualties.

Even more important, as Francis Fukuyama argued in his 1992 book “The End of History,” there seemed to be no system of governance competitive with liberal democracies and market capitalism. Nazism was long gone, Marxism was dead, and democracy was making vast gains in large parts of the world.

Sept. 11 ended this holiday from history. …

Christopher Hitchens has remarks for the 10th anniversary.

The proper task of the “public intellectual” might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and “unbelievers,” and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.

To me, this remains the main point about al-Qaida and its surrogates. I do not believe, by stipulating it as the main point, that I try to oversimplify matters. I feel no need to show off or to think of something novel to say. Moreover, many of the attempts to introduce “complexity” into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions. These range from the irredeemably paranoid and contemptible efforts to pin responsibility for the attacks onto the Bush administration or the Jews, to the sometimes wearisome but not necessarily untrue insistence that Islamic peoples have suffered oppression. (Even when formally true, the latter must simply not be used as nonsequitur special pleading for the use of random violence by self-appointed Muslims.) …

Charles Krauthammer thinks our reactions to 9/11 have been about right.

The new conventional wisdom on 9/11: We have created a decade of fear. We overreacted to 9/11 — al-Qaeda turned out to be a paper tiger; there never was a second attack — thereby bankrupting the country, destroying our morale and sending us into national decline.

The secretary of defense says that al-Qaeda is on the verge of strategic defeat. True. But why? Al-Qaeda did not spontaneously combust. Yet, in a decade Osama bin Laden went from the emir of radical Islam, jihadi hero after whom babies were named all over the Muslim world — to pathetic old recluse, almost incommunicado, watching shades of himself on a cheap TV in a bare room.

What turned the strong horse into the weak horse? Precisely the massive and unrelenting American war on terror, a systematic worldwide campaign carried out with increasing sophistication, efficiency and lethality — now so cheaply denigrated as an “overreaction.”

First came the Afghan campaign, once so universally supported that Democrats for years complained that President Bush was not investing enough blood and treasure there. Now, it is reduced to a talking point as one of “the two wars” that bankrupted us. Yet Afghanistan was utterly indispensable in defeating the jihadis then and now.  …

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Salon features someone asking what can be done about Obama destroying the Dem party.

From the debt ceiling fiasco to the recent rescheduling of a jobs speech at the behest of Speaker Boehner, it has not been a good summer for President Obama. Like Chinese water torture, Gallup’s daily tracking poll has shown a steady and unrelenting drip of bad news. He has been in and out of the high 30s for his approval, and in the low to mid-50s for his disapproval.

George W. Bush’s approval rating didn’t drop this low until Katrina hit. And on the economy, 71 percent of Americans disapprove of how Obama is doing his job. Even among reliably Democratic groups — union households, women and young people — he’s now unpopular.

No one, not even the president’s defenders, expect his coming jobs speech to mean anything. When the president spoke during a recent market swoon, the market dropped another 100 points. Democrats may soon have to confront an uncomfortable truth, and ask whether Obama is a suitable choice at the top of the ticket in 2012. They may then have to ask themselves if there’s any way they can push him off the top of the ticket.

That these questions have not yet been asked in any serious way shows how weak the Democratic Party is as a political organization. …

Splice Today, another liberal site asks the question, ” Is Barack Obama dumb?”  The heresy of the question has them open thus;

A mere four months ago, most readers looking at the above headline would undoubtedly shake their heads and think the author was a gun-for-hire Tea Party provocateur and quickly click away from the page. But the political climate has changed dramatically this summer, and even hard-core liberals are wondering about the smarts of President Obama as they consider the perceived nightmare of President Rick Perry (who was victim of the same headline last week on Politico). It’s a measure of Obama’s current electoral pickle that some of those questioning the President’s decisions (or lack thereof) write for The New York Times and openly wonder if the man can get re-elected, whether it’s Perry or Mitt Romney who wins the GOP nomination next year.

There are usual caveats: Of course Obama isn’t illiterate or Bush-dumb because as Jesse Louis Jackson once said, “God doesn’t make junk,” and the intelligence-challenged just aren’t allowed near Harvard, much less become editor of that university’s Law Review. And man, he sure can deliver (teleprompter notwithstanding) an inspiring speech! Let’s get this out the way now: in my view, without meeting either man, it’s silly to call either Obama or Perry “dumb.” Obama’s first three years in the White House have been, depending upon your views, disappointing, lackluster or just plain disastrous. But, unlike The Wall Street Journal’s excellent op-ed columnist Bret Stephens, who argued, “Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump.

WaPo’s Fact Checker examines one of the president’s claims and gives him the worst rating – 4 Pinocchio’s.

… Obama’s claim of having passed the “biggest middle-class tax cut in history” is ridiculous. He might have been on more solid ground if he had claimed the “broadest” tax cut, but that doesn’t sound very historic.

 We went back and forth over whether this was a three or four Pinocchio violation, until we found evidence that Obama knew he was saying a whopper.  Here’s how he put it in his 2010 State of the Union speech: “We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families.”  That phrasing, at least, would not have been so misleading.

Toby Harnden want to know if Hoffa and Biden will be censured by the administration.

… the statements today by Jimmy Hoffa Jr and Vice President Joe Biden demean the presidency and, tactically speaking, are stupid own goals.

Hoffa, the Teamsters president, was warming up a Detroit crowd when he said: “President Obama, this is your army, and we are ready to march. Everybody here’s got a vote. If we go back, and we keep the eye on the prize, let’s take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong.”

Biden, whose mouth has long been a liability for Obama, was at an AFL-CIO rally when he told union members: “You are the only folks keeping the barbarians from the gates…the other side has declared war on labour’s house.”

These comments were not nearly as bad as the statement last week by Congressman Andre Carson that members of the Tea Party want black people “hanging from a tree”. Let’s not get too sanctimonious here – they’re fairly common sentiments behind the scenes on both sides of the political divide.

The difference, of course, is that they were uttered publicly by someone chosen by the White House to introduce Obama and by the sitting vice-president at a time when Obama is calling for a bipartisan coming together to tackle the economy. …

More questions on the Hoffa comment from Victor Davis Hanson.

… A growing problem for Barack Obama is Barack Obama. Because he chose to be a sermonizing president, he is bound to practice what he so commonly preaches — otherwise he risks the fate of an Elmer Gantry, or sanctimonious Jimmy Carter. But on a number of topics, he has simply lost all credibility. How can Obama ever again lecture Americans on “civil discourse” and the need for common standards of polite public speech after following Hoffa’s mean-spirited rant and offering him praise? How, after these first family elite vacations to Martha’s Vineyard, Costa del Sol, Vail, etc., can Obama ever again credibly lecture on the dangers of indulgent “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” “spread the wealth,” and “fat cats” whose lives are so very different from our own? And how — after confessing that his “shovel-ready” $800 billion “stimulus” targeted at “investments” and “infrastructure” in fact “was not as shovel ready as we expected” — can he request to borrow hundreds of additional billions for shovel-ready investments in infrastructure? What has now changed to ensure the next near trillion will be “shovel-ready”? …

Debra Saunders is in San Francisco so she’ll have interesting thoughts on Solyndra.

Last year, President Obama came to the Bay Area to tout “green jobs” at an event at solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra’s Fremont plant. Quoth the president: “The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra.”

On Wednesday, Solyndra announced it was shuttering its remaining Fremont factory, laying off 1,100 workers and filing for bankruptcy. It was a sorry day for the Bay Area.

I remember that day, May 26, 2010, vividly. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to greet the president and wave to the hard hats. Venture capitalists preened. Just to show how brainy and farsighted the solar crowd is, Obama reminded the audience that his energy secretary, Steven Chu, is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

Rube that I am, I didn’t understand what Obamaland was thinking. Solyndra had not turned a profit since it was founded in 2005. The plant in which Obama stood was bankrolled with a $535 million federal loan guarantee. Two months before, PricewaterhouseCoopers questioned Solyndra’s “ability to continue as a going concern.”

If the president wants to send a positive message on the U.S. economy, I wondered, then couldn’t his people have found a California company that didn’t rely on a federal loan and actually made money? …

We started with a couple of liberals trashing the One. Now, Karl Rove takes a turn.

We can’t yet judge President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday before a joint session of Congress. But it’s not too early to render a judgment on the run-up to the address: It’s been amateur hour in the West Wing.

Eight days ago, Mr. Obama announced he would address Congress on the same evening that a Republican presidential debate was scheduled at the Reagan Library. White House press secretary Jay Carney claimed it was merely a “coincidence.” But his denial was soon undermined by comments to reporters by unnamed White House aides, who made it clear they intended to have the president drown out the GOP debate.

In any event, House Speaker John Boehner rightly nixed the date, pointing out that Wednesday was Congress’s first day back from its August recess and both the House and Senate must first pass resolutions inviting the president to appear.

Mr. Boehner was making an important point about institutional prerogatives. By setting the date and time of his own appearance, Mr. Obama was doing his best impression of an imperial president. A president addresses a joint session of Congress only at the invitation of the co-equal legislative branch. Mr. Obama didn’t seem to care. Mr. Boehner reminded him why he should.

So the president was forced to cave. …

It’s time for Late-Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Letterman: Big Labor Day Weekend. The day each year we celebrate our work force. Do we even have a work force anymore?

Leno: So the U.S. economy created zero jobs in August. Zero. President Obama says don’t read too much into that. How can we? There’s nothing there. It’s zero!

Leno: Well, at least Hurricane Irene did something the economy couldn’t do. It got President Obama back into the White House.

Letterman: President Obama’s uncle was arrested for DUI. Here’s the odd part: His blood-alcohol level was actually higher than the president’s job approval.

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David Warren reminds us of some Mid-East truths.

… If an identifiable Jew from Israel wanders, unguarded, into any part of the Palestinian territories, he is a dead man. This is a fact of life, and everyone knows it. Leftist and Islamist rhetoric about Israeli “apartheid” masks a very big truth: that more than a million Muslim Arabs live, work, and move freely around Israel, with full citizenship and protection under Israel’s laws (enforced by very liberal courts). Whereas, the number of Jews enjoying this status under the Palestinian Authority is zero.

The western position has been, settle a boundary, let Israel live in peace within it, let Palestinians live in peace on the other side. Let all past claims be resolved by direct negotiations, under international supervision. This is called “the two state solution.”

It sounds plausible, but only so long as we avert our eyes from the reality.

The UN will be granting Palestinian statehood without a resolution of anything. It will be a reward for consistent Palestinian refusal to negotiate in good faith, or to deliver on any significant undertakings made under the various Madrid, Oslo, and other “peace agreements” reached in the past.

Israel was told to exchange Gaza for peace. All the Jewish settlements in Gaza were uprooted. All the Israeli troops were withdrawn. Observe what happened.

Using the examples of Boeing, ATT/T Mobile, and Gibson Guitars, Peter Schiff calls the president, “Job Killer in Chief.” 

Friday morning, many on Wall Street were stunned by the big fat zero put up by the August jobs report, the worst showing in 11 months. The data convinced many previously optimistic economists that the United States will slip back into recession.

I believe that we have been in one giant recession all along that was only temporarily interrupted by trillions of useless and destructive deficit and stimulus spending.  Unfortunately, the August numbers will increase the talk of government efforts to stimulate the economy.

As President Obama prepares to unveil a new plan for the Federal Government to create jobs, evidence is rapidly piling up on how his administration is actively destroying jobs with stunning efficiency. Recent examples of this trend are enough to make anyone with even a casual respect for America’s former economic prowess hang their head in disgust. …

Toby Harnden says the man who ran on hope and change, will run this time on fear.

So how much trouble is Barack Obama in? Well, it doesn’t get much worse.

His approval rating is hovering just above 40 per cent. Unemployment is stuck at 9.1 per cent; the White House forecast that it would be about 6.5 per cent by now if its economic stimulus plan was passed. Essentially, the American economy is grinding to a halt.

More importantly, what is Obama going to do about it? In terms of policy, the White House has run out of whatever ideas it ever had.

Obama, who declined even to comment on the latest jobless figures on Friday, is like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

Having squandered the first two years of his presidency ramming through a healthcare reform that could not win the support of a single Republican on Capitol Hill and is now mired in the courts, he finds himself confronting a divided Congress.

So the only thing that matters to the people around Obama, who are eager for another four years of employment, is his re-election. I’ve long thought that Obama himself is lukewarm about continuing in a job where the adulation he is used to is in short supply. For Democratic powerbrokers, however, maintaining their grasp of the White House is everything. …

OC Register editors say we should remember the background of Alan Krueger, new head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Thus equipped we can expect more failure.

… Mr. Krueger worked on Mr. Obama’s “cash for clunkers” program. That didn’t work. Its main effect was to remove old, cheap vehicles from sales lots, making it difficult for poor people to buy cars. According to the NADA Used Car Guide, the average price of a used car two to five years old soared to $16,765 in April 2011 from $10,000 in January 2009.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Krueger maintains “that increases in the minimum wage don’t depress employment.” This defies basic economics, in which higher prices reduce demand (in this case, demand for workers).

“Krueger is a champion of the minimum wage – that is, outlawing some jobs – as good for the economy,” Lew Rockwell told us; he’s chairman of the free-market Mises Institute. “But if orders from D.C. to pay everyone more are a good idea, why not $10,000 an hour? Maybe because there would be 100 percent unemployment. Krueger is the worst sort of authoritarian Keynesian.”

Believers in Keynesian economics, named after British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), believe that government can stimulate economic growth through minimum-wage increases, more government spending, inflation and artificially low interest rates. As during the 1970s “malaise” economy, it is just these policies that have been tried under Mr. Obama, and have failed. …

Legal Insurrection blog says workers who have no hope are keeping Obama’s re-election hope alive. If discouraged job seekers were in the work force, the unemployment rate would be 11.4%.  

James Delingpole has fun with green jobs.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has published a report into the future of “Green Jobs” in Britain. It is damning indeed. Though it doesn’t actually say as much – the GWPF is too austere and restrained for such flippancies – this Government’s green policies are the equivalent of trying to pay off the national debt by breeding unicorns to sell to Chinese millionaires.

Among the conclusions of The Myth of Green Jobs by Gordon Hughes, Professor of Economics at Edinburgh University, are:

1. “Green jobs” are a chimera. Though diverting taxpayers money into the renewable energy sector may indeed “create” jobs in the renewable energy sector, it will cost many more jobs in the broader economy.

2. Policies to promote renewable energy will add 0.6 to 0.7 per cent per annum to core inflation from now till 2020. This is equivalent to a rise in the same period of the Consumer Price Index by 6.5 per cent. if the Government sticks to its inflation targets and applies restrictions on speed of growth through higher interest rates, then the “sacrifice cost” – ie what the economy could have made, but was prevented from doing so by monetary policy – is £250 billion. …

The “Waffle House Index” is written up in the WSJ.

When a hurricane makes landfall, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency relies on a couple of metrics to assess its destructive power.

First, there is the well-known Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. Then there is what he calls the “Waffle House Index.”

Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.

“If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?” FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has said. “That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work.” …

Turns out the president no longer approves of us. That was the story from Barton Hinkle of Richmond’s Times-Dispatch. Reason Magazine had the reprint.

… The administration strongly approves of only 9 percent of Americans, while 47 percent are strongly disapproved of. Another 28 percent are somewhat disapproved of, and the White House somewhat approves of the remaining 16 percent.

“What these numbers show, I think, is that the president has become increasingly disillusioned with the American public,” said Trevor Gopnik, a professor of political science at Georgetown University.

“He’s completely disgusted,” said White House press secretary Jay Carney. “Which shouldn’t be all that surprising, given the state of the economy, the high unemployment rate, and the fact that most Americans are, let’s face it, fat lazy slobs. Go to a mall and look around if you don’t believe me,” said Carney.

The summer’s debt-ceiling stalemate has contributed to the president’s sour mood, observers say, as did the decision to cut short his vacation a day early even though many Americans are still enjoying theirs. …

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The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait thinks the administration’s campaign ideas are deluded.

Michael Scherer, via Mike Allen, reports that the White House is listening to cheerful historical analogies:

“In June, … White House chief of staff Bill Daley arranged a secret retreat for his senior team at Fort McNair … Historian Michael Beschloss went along as a guest speaker to help answer the one question on everyone’s mind: How does a U.S. President win re-election with the country suffering unacceptably high rates of unemployment? The historian’s lecture provided a lift for Barack Obama’s team. No iron law in politics is ever 100% accurate, Beschloss told the group. Two Presidents in the past century—Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 and Ronald Reagan in 1984—won re-­election amid substantial economic suffering. Both used the same two-part strategy: FDR and Reagan argued that the country, though in pain, was improving and that their opponents, anchored in past failures, would make things worse. … The President’s aides, all but resigned to unemployment above 8% on Election Day, now see in Roosevelt and Reagan a plausible path to victory. They intend to make sure voters believe a year from now that their fortunes are improving, and they plan to persuade the American people that a Republican in the White House would be a step backward. …”

This is a reporter summarizing another’s reporter’s summary of an event no reporter actually attended, so we are looking through the glass darkly. That caveat aside, this sounds like pure delusion. Roosevelt in 1936 and Reagan in 1984 had high unemployment, yes. But they also had very rapid economic growth. …

Daily Beast’s Jill Lawrence says the suit against Boeing is going to be a wonderful weapon for the GOP in 2012.

It’s easy to imagine the 30-second TV ad: “You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a union member near Seattle because the Obama administration wants to kill jobs and capitalism and tell corporations where to expand.”

Readers of a certain age may recognize the echo of an incendiary and strategically successful 1990 campaign ad for Sen. Jesse Helms. Back then, the job had to go to “a minority because of a racial quota.” The 2012 version, rooted in a complaint the National Labor Relations Board has lodged against Boeing over a new plant in South Carolina, resonates just as deeply. Forget its bureaucratic origins: This is a tale of regional tensions, existential labor struggles, and millions of stressed-out Americans with shrinking incomes or no jobs at all.

To recap: Boeing has just built and opened a non-union 787 Dreamliner assembly plant in North Charleston. The expansion into the right-to-work state came after executives warned that strikes by the company’s unionized workforce in Everett, Wash., had set back production and affected their deliberations on where to locate the new plant. The International Association of Machinists, which is trying to protect jobs in the Puget Sound area, calls that illegal retaliation; Boeing says hogwash. Absent a settlement, the federal complaint could take years to resolve.

Several Democrats told me voters don’t and won’t care about a technical case at an obscure agency. But Republicans are working hard to make voters care .

Jennifer Rubin thinks Maureen Dowd has changed.

Maureen Dowd has had it. “Republicans who are worried about being political props have a point. The president is using the power of the incumbency and a sacred occasion for a political speech. Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed. The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.” Ouch.

John Podhoretz worked in the Reagan White House and reported on the H.W. Bush version. So he knows how one should run. He says this one is a mess.

… I spent six months working in the Reagan White House in 1988, and in a working life of 30 years, I’ve never seen any organization function as smoothly. Everybody knew his job; everybody knew how to do his job; there were systems in place to handle conflicts and arguments.

In September 1991, I began a reporting project on the re-election efforts of the White House of George H.W. Bush that carried through to the election he lost in 1992. As I watched and interviewed, it was clear that the White House organization Bush had inherited from Ronald Reagan had ceased to function effectively.

Senior officials failed to relay work goals and aims to their underlings. There was no effective process for determining policy, and the process by which the White House communicated to the rest of the government and to the public was even worse.

One telling result of this confusion and chaos was that all kinds of little things began to go wrong. Events were poorly planned. Rival drafts of speeches circulated, and no one knew which one was the official draft and which was the effort to undercut it.

The sense of directionlessness and confusion was crystallized when President Bush went to New Hampshire and read the words “Message: I Care” off a card provided by his staff. He wasn’t supposed to speak them, but to talk extemporaneously and give the impression that he cared. But no one had bothered to tell him that was the approach of the day, or that the cards weren’t speech texts. …

Michael Barone on the speech flap.

I can’t remember a more stunning rebuke of a president by a congressional leader than Speaker John Boehner’s refusal to agree to Barack Obama’s demand — er, request — that he summon a joint session of Congress to hear the president’s latest speech on the economy at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 7.

Obama’s request was regarded as a clever move by some wise guys in the left blogosphere since that was the exact time of a long-scheduled Republican presidential candidate debate at the Reagan Library. Take that, you guys!

But Boehner smoothly responded that, with Congress reconvening late that afternoon, the security sweep necessary for a presidential visit would be impossible, and invited the president to speak on Thursday. White House officials quickly agreed, scheduling the speech at 7 p.m. Eastern to avoid overlap with the first game of the National Football League season.

Not such a big deal, some people are saying. I disagree. I think it illustrates several of the weaknesses of this presidency. …

Rich Lowry has more on Solyndra.

We have seen the future, and it went bankrupt.

If the praises of high-ranking Obama-administration officials were a viable business plan, the solar-panel maker Solyndra would be an industrial juggernaut. Vice President Biden insisted that the jobs created by the California-based firm would “allow America to compete and to lead like we did in the 20th century.”

In a visit to Solyndra in May 2010, President Obama called it “a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism.” He all but redefined the traditional statement of Americanness to encompass motherhood, apple pie, and the conversion of sunlight into electricity through cylindrical thin-film solar cells, the specialty of Solyndra.

Obama and Biden were literally invested in Solyndra’s success. The company got a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee, the first in a highly vaunted Department of Energy green-jobs program, as part of the stimulus. This was supposed to be the new economic model: government and its favored industries cooperating to lead the country into a green, politically approved recovery.

The showcase firm is now filing for Chapter 11 in an embarrassing blow to the premises of Obamanomics. At least the Obama administration can’t be accused of practicing industrial policy the old-fashioned way and picking winners. It is evidently quite ready to pick losers, too. …

Jennifer Rubin thinks Jeb Bush is part of the GOP’s strong bench.

It is fair to say that if his last name were not Bush, he would have been the consensus choice for president in 2012. Jeb Bush says that he isn’t running, and unless the current field collapses (always possible) and he can be dragged into the race he is not going to be the nominee this time around. However, he can tell Republicans a lot about what sort of candidate they should look for.

He does not represent a particular faction or region. He appeals to many constituent groups, but he does not identify with one or the other. He is unifying, not divisive within the party.

He is easy on the ears. Not every sentence ends with an exclamation mark. He does not insult or rant; he speaks as if he is having a conversation with voters. He wears well.

His ideas are revolutionary, but he is no radical. He wants to reform government, not blow it up. He’s interested in the substance of governing and can talk intelligently on a variety of issues with a level of specificity uncommon among politicians. …

Another “green” pipedream gets the once over from Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Wouldn’t you love to have an electric car? They’re clean, green and righteous. And once we make the switch, we can pull the plug on fossil fuels, air pollution, imported oil and Middle Eastern autocrats, and create millions of green jobs into the bargain.

No wonder progressive governments are so eager to plow money into electric cars. This week, Ontario’s McGuinty government (which likes to brag that Ontario is Canada’s greenest province) showered Magna International with nearly $50-million to develop new electric vehicle technologies. Magna, which is rolling in dough, admits it doesn’t need the money. But in a world where capital and jobs are mobile, such gratuities are expected.

Dalton McGuinty is a true believer in electric cars. He hopes that, by 2020, 5 per cent of the vehicles on Ontario’s roads will be electric. That’s why he’s also plowing money into charging stations and battery technologies.

There’s just one problem. The fantasy that electric cars are right around the corner doesn’t survive even the most cursory reality check. As Dennis DesRosiers, a leading auto consultant, points out, consumers simply won’t pay a $20,000 premium for a vehicle that doesn’t go very far, isn’t very convenient, and runs out of juice as soon as you turn on the air conditioner.

Consider hybrids. After a decade on the market, they’ve captured only 3 per cent of sales. To get to Mr. McGuinty’s 2020 target, green-minded Ontarians would have to buy at least 100,000 electric cars a year every year, starting right now. Total U.S. sales of electric vehicles are about 10,000 a year. …

The College Fix reports disturbing news about education majors.

Those who can’t do, teach? According to a new report, it might be true: Education majors get easier grades in college.

The study by Dr. Cody Koedel, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Missouri, compares the grades of education students with non-education students at two large state schools—and finds a gap. According to the report, “Students who take education classes at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in every other academic discipline.”

In the two schools examined in the study, Indiana University and the University of Missouri, the average grade point averages for education students were 3.66 and 3.80, and at Missouri, “every single student received an A (that is, 4.0) in one out of every five (non-freshman) undergraduate education classes.”

The high grades aren’t just exclusive to Indiana and Missouri, though. Another report by Koedel, uses data from other schools to show similar grade distributions across the country.

“The data consistently show that education departments award exceptionally favorable grades to virtually all their students in all their classes,” Koedel said. ..

NY Times has on Op-Ed in praise of teachers. Seems fitting we balance the last item. However, it is instructive that this piece is an anecdote, because other than anecdotal evidence, it is hard to find shining news coming out of the education milieu.

… From the first through third grades, I went to school in a neighboring town because it was the school where my mother got her first teaching job. I was not a great student. I was slipping in and out of depression from a tumultuous family life that included the recent divorce of my parents. I began to grow invisible. My teachers didn’t seem to see me nor I them. (To this day, I can’t remember any of their names.)

My work began to suffer so much that I was temporarily placed in the “slow” class. No one even talked to me about it. They just sent a note. I didn’t believe that I was slow, but I began to live down to their expectations.

When I entered the fourth grade, my mother got a teaching job in our hometown and I came back to my hometown school. I was placed in Mrs. Thomas’s class.

There I was, a little nothing of a boy, lost and slumped, flickering in and out of being.

She was a pint-sized firecracker of a woman, with short curly hair, big round glasses set wider than her face, and a thin slit of a mouth that she kept well-lined with red lipstick.

On the first day of class, she gave us a math quiz. Maybe it was the nervousness of being the “new kid,” but I quickly jotted down the answers and turned in the test — first.

“Whoa! That was quick. Blow, we’re going to call you Speedy Gonzales.” She said it with a broad approving smile, and the kind of eyes that warmed you on the inside.

She put her arm around me and pulled me close while she graded my paper with the other hand. I got a couple wrong, but most of them right.

I couldn’t remember a teacher ever smiling with approval, or putting their hand around me, or praising my performance in any way.

It was the first time that I felt a teacher cared about me, saw me or believed in me. It lit a fire in me. I never got a bad grade again. ..

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LA Times editors want to know the details of how bankrupt Solyndra got its $500 million loan from the ”smart” administration.

When Solyndra, a Bay Area maker of industrial solar panels, announced plans to file for bankruptcy protection Wednesday, it wasn’t just a blow for the company’s 1,100 laid-off employees or the investors who have pumped millions into the venture. It called into question the Obama administration’s entire clean-energy stimulus program.

Solyndra was the first company to be awarded a federal loan guarantee under the stimulus, worth $535 million. Taxpayers are likely to end up on the hook for much if not all of that amount, a highly embarrassing development for President Obama because he was among the company’s biggest cheerleaders. He visited its Fremont plant in May 2010 even though PricewaterhouseCoopers had weeks earlier raised doubts about its plans for an initial public offering by questioning whether it could continue as a going concern.

That’s especially troubling because Solyndra is backed by one of Obama’s key fundraisers, George Kaiser of Tulsa. …

ABC News actually had the story in May.

… When the Obama administration announced financing for Solyndra in 2009, the company was only four years old, Solyndra in 2009, the company was only four years old, and had been shipping solar panels for about a year. Officials said the administration was eager to stimulate the economy and encourage green energy start-ups. Energy Secretary Steven Chu promised Solyndra’s package alone would create more than 4,000 jobs. 

One year later, in March 2010, the signs were not so encouraging. “The Company has suffered recurring losses from operations, negative cash flows since inception and has a net stockholders’ deficit,” is how Solyndra’s accountant, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC, assessed its financial status in an audit being prepared for an initial public offering. Those factors, it stressed, “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

Solyndra has since boosted revenues, though some analysts remain skeptical about its long-term prospects. …

… “Secretary Chu credited the Department’s loan team for their work accelerating the process to offer this conditional commitment in less than two months, demonstrating the power of teamwork and the speed at which the Department can operate when barriers to success are removed,” …

… “If anything, they’re still swimming upstream in a very competitive market,” said Shyam Mehta , senior solar analyst at Greentech Media Research.

Mehta has long raised questions about the company’s manufacturing costs in a world market where China offers stiff competition. He said Solyndra has focused on cutting those costs, but that there’s no assurance the company — or the government loan guarantee — will prove successful.

“There’s a lot at stake here, not just for Solyndra,” Mehta said. “This is going to be held up as a cautionary tale if  things don’t work out for Solyndra. People are watching very closely from all angles.”

NBC and MSNBC manage to ignore Solyndra bankruptcy. NewsBusters has the story.

As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, a solar company that was given over a half a billion dollars in stimulus funds declared bankruptcy this week.

Although most news outlets did at least give this story some coverage, two organizations owned by the same company with intricate ties to the Obama administration completely ignored it.

Yes, that would be NBC News and MSNBC who according to LexisNexis didn’t mention Solyndra once after the Wednesday announcement.

Not once. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on Solyndra.

.. But the Solyndra situation is emblematic of a much larger issue for the president: He appears to be in over his head. The White House and loyal pundits have struggled mightily to convince Americans that Obama’s agenda was moderate and that the raft of new regulations (from the new consumer protection agency to Dodd-Frank), the car company bailouts, the huge spending sprees and Obamacare are modest steps. The electorate didn’t generally buy that, and indeed the backlash spawned the Tea Party movement. But something that Democrats, Republicans and independents can all agree is that he’s failing. His pet green company goes into bankruptcy. His speech rollout was a mess. The jobs picture is bleak. In big and small ways the theme is driven home: He’s doing a lousy job.

If all that doesn’t make you sick, how about learning Yale University, with a $16 billion endowment got money from the stimulus program? Michael Rubin in Contentions; 

According to Yale University’s 2010 endowment report, Yale has upwards of $16 billion in its investment portfolio. While that’s not $16 billion the university can spend—Yale lives off the interest of its investments and its donations—it’s still a sizeable chunk of chump change which gives the university a lot of flexibility to determine what it wants to spend, where and how.

With so much money in the bank, it is somewhat outrageous that the university appears to have been receiving federal stimulus spending (in addition to other federal aid). According to the Yale Daily News: …

James Pethokoukis was in Commentary asking and answering the question. “Did Obama make it worse?”

What if the president of the United States hadn’t proposed an $800 billion stimulus plan back in 2009—but one twice as large? That is the question haunting the intellectual left, led by the economist and columnist Paul Krugman, especially since the economy is mired in what might charitably be considered the doldrums. It slowed to a near-total halt in the first quarter of 2011 with a growth rate of 0.4 percent before climbing to a comatose 1.3 percent rate in the second.

For Krugman’s opposite numbers, the question is the reverse: Might the U.S. economy actually be stronger today if Uncle Sam had done nothing and just let the business cycle play out? And what might have been different had John McCain been elected the 44th president instead of Barack Obama?? Would he have acted differently? Would the result have been different?

The what-if debate is not merely an intellectual exercise. It will have some effect on American policy going forward. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was Barack Obama’s signature achievement in dealing with the most worrisome set of economic conditions since the Great Depression. It was how Obama, to use a pair of his now seemingly abandoned metaphors, sought to drag the economy out of the ditch while the Republicans were standing around sipping Slurpees. …

… Did Obama make it worse? It is certainly the case that he only deepened a long-term trend that threatens American prosperity more than any other. The events of 2008–2009 exposed a truth about the U.S. economy from which we had shielded ourselves: economic growth has been slowing in a worrisome way throughout the decade. The nation’s GDP has averaged 3.3 percent annual growth for the past half century. But from 2001 to 2007—before the recession hit—it averaged only 2.6 percent. Going forward, growth might be even slower due to the aftermath of the financial crisis and the aging of the population. The Congressional Budget Office?, for instance, pegs long-term growth at just 2 percent or so.

But that downshift isn’t fated. The McKinsey Global Institute thinks a higher retirement age and smarter immigration policy could make the labor force grow more quickly, while smarter tax and regulatory policy could boost worker productivity. Replacing the income tax with a consumption tax, for instance, would likely make the economy grow faster over the long run by increasing investment.

These are the sorts of ideas that are likely to be a central part of the political discussion going forward in a way they never have been. The two-party debacle that was the debt-ceiling debate and the disgusted national reaction to it suggest that the American public is likely to be more open to new remedies for the nation’s ills—remedies that have not been stained by their association with the failed policies of the past four years.

We’re stuck for now with an anemic and debt-laden economy that may muddle along for years. But it didn’t have to be this way. The one thing we can all say for certain is that we could have made it better.

Just another case of federal foolishness. This time from North Idaho via Pajamas Media.

A North Idaho man killed a grizzly bear that was threatening his family. Now he could face jail time if the Obama administration has its way.

Rachel Hill looked out her bedroom window on the evening of Mother’s Day and saw three grizzly bears attacking the children’s 4H club pigs’ pen. The Hill children had been outside practicing basketball a half hour earlier, so seeing the bears concerned her and her husband, Jeremy Hill. After calling for his kids and hearing no response, Jeremy grabbed his daughter’s rifle. After once more calling for the kids, fearing they were in danger, he shot at the closest grizzly bear, which was about 120 feet away.

The other two grizzlies fled while the wounded bear began to run off in the same direction, but then turned and came towards the house. Hill shot the bear a final time due to the danger a severely wounded grizzly bear posed to his family and others. Hill called two officials with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. They came out, investigated, and unsuccessfully tried to capture the other two grizzly bears by placing bear traps on the property.

Regardless of the danger to Hill’s family, grizzly bears are listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, thus the federal government is prosecuting him. If convicted, Hill could face up to one year in prison and a $50,000 fine. …

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Michael Barone also writes about Toobin’s New Yorker piece on Clarence Thomas.

… The bulk of the article is worthy of attention because Toobin, despite his obvious distaste for Thomas’ views, takes him seriously as a judicial thinker and pathfinder.

“In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court,” Toobin writes. “Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.”

Toobin is on particularly strong ground when he discusses the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms. For years it was considered a dead letter in sophisticated legal circles, protecting only the right to bear arms as a member of the National Guard.

But in 1997 Thomas wrote a concurring opinion in a case invalidating one provision in a 1993 gun control law. Thomas pointed to the emerging legal scholarship, some of it the product of liberal law professors like Sanford Levinson, arguing that the Second Amendment was intended to protect a personal right to own guns. …

Jonah Goldberg writes on Obama’s dependence on experts.

… Philip Tetlock’s 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment, documents that the predictions of even the most credentialed and experienced experts are often worse and very rarely better than random guessing. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization,” he writes, “there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals — distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on — are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.”

The cult of experts has acolytes in all ideological camps, but its most institutionalized following is on the left. The Left needs to believe in the authority of experts because without that authority, almost no economic intervention can be justified. If you concede that you have no idea whether your remedy will work, it’s going to be hard to sell it to the patient. Market-based ideologies don’t have that problem because markets expect events in ways experts never can.

No president since Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt has been more enamored with the cult of expertise than Obama. That none of his economic predictions have panned out is not surprising. What is surprising is that so many people are surprised.

Spengler also picks up on the dismal record of Obama’s latest appointment.

… Once again, it appears that Obama has hired the best incompetence that money can buy. Larry Summers may have one of the highest IQ’s on record, but he believes that the mathematical models which he plays so cannily have something to do with the real world in which investors lose sleep over risk, entrepreneurs lose sleep over making the payroll, and large-company executives lose sleep over making their numbers.

Large corporations who already have health care plans, and have serried ranks of lawyers to deal with the regulators, are doing very well, in fact. S&P 500 corporations increased employment by 10% over the past year while overall employment was flat. Start-ups who have to deal with Obamacare and the rest of the Washington regulatory burden can’t get over the threshold. Remove the obstacles and let Americans do what they do best and the economy will recover.

Noemie Emery asks, “What if Obama isn’t so smart.”

Eek! Another Republican moron is running for president, and the blogs on the Left are aghast.

Another village in Texas is missing its idiot!

Another s–t-kicking cowboy has messed with their heads.

The question this time is not just whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry is dumb — the Left claims the obvious answer is yes — but also whether he is as dumb as George W. Bush, or even much dumber, moronic where Bush was simply “incurious,” and also much less gently bred.

Either way, few on the Left doubt that neither is, as Steve Benen says, “an intellectually curious, creative thinker, capable to examining [sic] complex issues in a sophisticated way.”

Fortunately we have such a thinker, “capable to examining” things to perfection, and that is the problem: President Obama is their ideal of a thinker. He is president, and he has been — how to put it? — a bomb.

Based on results, Perry has been more successful as governor of Texas than Obama has been as president, or as anything else he has ever tried being, in the entire whole course of his life. …

Solar energy queen Solyndra touted by Obama, goes broke with $535 million of our money. The Hill has the story. Smartest guys around, right?

The announcement comes at a tough time for the solar industry, which has faced free-falling solar panel prices.

But the Obama administration has doubled-down on its investments in the industry. The Energy Department finalized last week an $852 million loan guarantee for a separate California solar project sponsored by NextEra Energy. Earlier in August, DOE finalized a $197 million loan guarantee for solar manufacturing facilities in Oregon and California.

Solyndra received the $535 million stimulus loan guarantee from the Energy Department in 2009 to help finance the construction of a new plant to manufacture solar panels.

David Harsanyi says you don’t have to be smart, just right.

… Now, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, leading Republican presidential candidate, readily admits that he’s not a scholarly type. But if your spider senses, like mine, are tingling, it probably has more to do with Perry’s slippery politics than it does with his aversion to curling up with a dog-eared copy of The Wealth of Nations.

In a recent Politico piece (one that mistakes wonkery for overall intelligence), readers are asked, Is Rick Perry dumb? “He is not an ideas man,” explains Politico. He “hasn’t spent his political career marking up the latest Cato or Heritage white papers or reading policy-heavy books late into the night. Advisers and colleagues have informed much of his thinking over the years.”

Listen, I love reading a Cato white paper as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t make me smart; it makes me tragically boring. No doubt Barack Obama picked up his sad conviction in redistributionist economics perusing stacks of white papers—highlight marker within reach—but his presidency was won on crude progressive populism anchored in emotion, not reason. Policy ideas had little to do with Obama’s election victory, though they have almost everything to do with his failures as president. …

Toby Harnden reviews the administration’s speech scheduling stunt.

Oh dear. Maybe it seemed like a clever move during a late-night pizza session amongst White House aides. But the decision to try to get one over on House Republicans by publicly asking for President Barack Obama to address a Joint Session of Congress without first agreeing the date and time was a petty and foolish one.

Congress is a co-equal branch of the United States government. A president addressing a Joint Session is guest of Congress. Guests do not invite themselves and there is a long-established practice of agreeing the date behind the scenes and then going public afterwards.

It seems clear that Speaker John Boehner’s office got some kind of heads up about the proposal before the White House went public. But it appears equally obvious that Boehner didn’t go anywhere near to agreeing to it.

So Boehner called Obama’s bluff – and Obama now has two basic options: do the speech next Thursday before Congress or do it from the Oval Office or somewhere other than Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

Jennifer Rubin says the Kansas City Star editors know why the trade deals have been stalled.

… “The real problem is squabbling over the level of aid under a program for workers displaced by foreign competition. Democrats seek to keep spending at elevated levels, while Republicans want to scale back to earlier levels. Surely this issue could be handled separately while Congress moves on the three trade deals, which were all signed before Obama came into office.”

Unfortunately, while Obama dithers the U.S. is losing market share. (“Colombia’s ambassador to the United States, Gabriel Silva Lujan,” says the editorial, “notes that U.S. farmers once claimed 46 percent of Colombia’s food import market. Now the proportion is 20 percent — and likely to go lower. A free trade pact between Colombia and Canada, another big wheat exporter, went into effect last week.”)

In truth, Obama could have sent the trade deals up at any time in the last two and a half years. That he has not suggests he prefers playing politics over offending his Big Labor donors.

Tony Blankley says the jobs policy is the last chance for this administration to get it right. But they won’t.

… I concede it is extraordinarily unlikely that the president will take up my free-market economic policy proposal. Sadly, many presidents, both Republican and Democratic, fail because they remain enthralled to their early policy positions – ineffective as they may have proved to be – and find themselves emotionally unable to divorce themselves from those early mistakes.

The Daily Caller outlines the latest from the administration that will kill jobs.

On Tuesday the National Labor Relations Board announced three new decisions that industry experts say will likely hurt the economy and cost American jobs.

The first and likely most controversial NLRB ruling overturned a 2007 decision that gave workers nationwide the right to protect themselves from union bosses’ bullying and coercive tactics with secret ballot elections.

Via its newly-decided Lamons Gasket case, the NLRB eliminated the 2007 Dana Corp ruling, which the National Right to Work Foundation said protected workers from “coercive practices” union organizers often used to “bully or mislead employees.” ..

Kathryn Jean Lopez provides a few shorts from Cheney’s book.

Why Run? (130)

I was often asked by people why in the world I wanted to be a freshman member of the House, serving in the minority party, after I’d already been White House chief of staff. I used to explain that there was something very special about having your name on the ballot and convincing thousands of voters to support you. That running and winning the right to cast your state’s vote in the U.S. House of Representatives was politics at its best. That being elected in accordance with our Constitution meant you had earned the right to cast that vote and no one could take it away except by defeating you at the polls. Your political fate didn’t depend upon someone else’s success in an election.

Newt (132)

After describing him as the most memorable member of his congressional class (1976), Cheney writes:

Our relationship was useful in maintaining some degree of peace among the Republicans in the House. For the leadership I served as a bridge to the younger, more aggressive members. For Newt I provided knowledge of which lines he shouldn’t step over if he didn’t want to get in a pile of trouble. And for me, my role allowed me to be identified on the one hand as part of the Republican establishment and on the other as someone who had close ties to the younger generation, eager to overthrow the establishment.

Bittersweet review in Village Voice of Glen Campbell’s latest and last.

You don’t know the meaning of “poignant” until Glen Campbell, sitting two feet from you, starts to sing “Ghost on the Canvas,” the title track of his new—and final—album. The country great, who’s going through the early stages of Alzheimer’s, sometimes forgets which family member once saved him from drowning, the last city he played, which guitar he used on “Good Vibrations.” But when he sails into the magical realism of this heartbreaking Paul Westerberg ballad, he’s the old Glen.

“I know a place between/Life and death/For you and me,” he croons in his familiar, boyish tenor. He sings on about the end, about eternity, and you have to turn your head away, to brush back tears.

Campbell, still spry and blond at 75, his wife, Kim, sitting beside him, is in Manhattan to promote Ghost, maybe the finest album he’s ever made. …