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Nile Gardiner calls attention to a disturbing poll.

This week, The Hill newspaper published a poll that is dispiriting to anyone concerned about the future of America as the world’s leading power. It was one of the most damning yet, illustrating just how far most Americans believe their country has fallen in recent years. According to The Hill:

“More than two-thirds of voters say the United States is declining, and a clear majority think the next generation will be worse off than this one, according to the results of a new poll commissioned by The Hill.

A resounding 69 percent of respondents said the country is “in decline,” the survey found, while 57 percent predict today’s kids won’t live better lives than their parents. Additionally, 83 percent of voters indicated they’re either very or somewhat worried about the future of the nation, with 49 percent saying they’re “very worried.”

The results suggest that Americans don’t view the country’s current economic and political troubles as temporary, but instead see them continuing for many years. …”

Peggy Noonan compares the constant campaigner to Paul Ryan.

… Mr. Ryan receives much praise, but I don’t think his role in the current moment has been fully recognized. He is doing something unique in national politics. He thinks. He studies. He reads. Then he comes forward to speak, calmly and at some length, about what he believes to be true. He defines a problem and offers solutions, often providing the intellectual and philosophical rationale behind them. Conservatives naturally like him—they agree with him—but liberals and journalists inclined to disagree with him take him seriously and treat him with respect.

This week he spoke on “The American Idea” at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. He scored the president as too small for the moment, as “petty” in his arguments and avoidant of the decisions entailed in leadership. At times like this, he said, “the temptation to exploit fear and envy returns.” Politicians divide in order to “evade responsibility for their failures” and to advance their interests.

The president, he said, has made a shift in his appeal to the electorate. “Instead of appealing to the hope and optimism that were hallmarks of his first campaign, he has launched his second campaign by preying on the emotions of fear, envy and resentment.”

But Republicans, in their desire to defend free economic activity, shouldn’t be snookered by unthinking fealty to big business. They should never defend—they should actively oppose—the kind of economic activity that has contributed so heavily to the crisis. Here Mr. Ryan slammed “corporate welfare and crony capitalism.”

“Why have we extended an endless supply of taxpayer credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, instead of demanding that their government guarantee be wound down and their taxpayer subsidies ended?” Why are tax dollars being wasted on bankrupt, politically connected solar energy firms like Solyndra? “Why is Washington wasting your money on entrenched agribusiness?”

Rather than raise taxes on individuals, we should “lower the amount of government spending the wealthy now receive.” The “true sources of inequity in this country,” he continued, are “corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless.” The real class warfare that threatens us is “a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society.”

If more Republicans thought—and spoke—like this, the party would flourish. People would be less fearful for the future. And Mr. Obama wouldn’t be seeing his numbers go up.

Christopher Caldwell writes on the Greek bailout for the Weekly Standard.

As they do every few weeks, the leaders of the European Union met in Brussels on Wednesday, October 26, to solve their finance problems once and for all. As the sun rose on Thursday they emerged with a document that resembled an Obama budget—crystal-clear about its aims and aspirations, opaque about how it intends to achieve them. There is a reason for that. It is that these aims and aspirations are growing less and less realistic.

Back in 2010, when the crisis seemed confined to the Greek government’s inability to repay its lenders, the Europeans thought they could fix things by having its various neighbor countries chip in 45 billion euros ($65 billion) to throw at the problem. Eighteen months later, the crisis is as complicated as a Rube Goldberg machine and more dangerous. The particular corner of it they dealt with last week has three intertwined aspects, and to solve one of them is to exacerbate the other two: …

Debra Saunders and student debt. 

One of the great things about America, President Obama told students at the University of Colorado, is that no matter how humble your roots, you still have a shot at a great education. He also told students that his goal is to “make college more affordable.” Alas, the president’s prescription for making higher education affordable seems likely to yield the same results as his plan for curbing health care costs – that is, it is likely to drive prices higher than inflation.

The nation’s next fiscal nightmare may well be a higher-education bubble.

Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards. As USA Today reported, America’s student loan debt is expected to exceed $1 trillion this year. Rising costs have left many graduates in a deep hole. Many of last year’s graduates walked away with a diploma and, on average, $24,000 in student loans. The default rate on student loans rose to 8.8 percent in 2009. …

Continuing on the theme of impossible debt, Steven Malanga writes for the Journal on Harrisburg, PA. 

During an April 2009 debate among candidates vying to be mayor of Harrisburg, Pa., one aspirant suggested that the financially troubled city should sell some of its valuable historical artifacts and use the proceeds to finance a “Harrisburg Museum of Bad Ideas.” One compelling exhibit would be the city’s recent decision to file for bankruptcy protection.

Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, is drowning in debt. City officials have known for more than four years that they’d have to deal with the fiscal mess, but they punted. The state has engineered a bailout plan, but the city council rejected it. Instead it has asked creditors to forgo as much as $100 million of the debt. Essentially, the city council is engaged in a giant game of brinksmanship with the state and creditors, daring them to come up with something that’s less onerous than the current state plan, which involves asset sales and renegotiating union contracts. …

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Fisker Karma. That’s the $80,000 car financed by federal loans, but built in Finland. Our idiot government has tagged this luxury vehicle as a “sub-compact.” We get the story from Green Auto Blog.

… See, the EPA has a strange methodology that bases vehicle classes on interior size, and the Karma isn’t exactly spacious inside (the upcoming Fisker Surf has more luggage space). As AutoObserver notes, since the Karma has less than 100 cubic-feet of space, it fits nicely into the subcompacts class. Go figure. …

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Robert Samuelson says default is what happened to Greece.

There’s an Orwellian quality to Europe’s latest financial rescue. Words lose their ordinary meaning. Greece, for example, has clearly defaulted, but no one says so. In July, private lenders agreed “voluntarily” to accept an estimated 21 percent reduction in their loans to Greece. Now that’s been pushed to 50 percent, and private lenders’ consent is still described as “voluntary.” Well, it’s about as “voluntary as when one hands over one’s wallet in response to the choice of, ‘Your money or your life,’?” notes Douglas Elliott of the Brookings Institution.

What constitutes a default? Here is Standard & Poor’s definition: “We generally define a sovereign default as the failure to meet [the] interest or principal payments .?.?. contained in the original terms of the rated obligation.” Not much doubt there: A 50 percent “haircut” wasn’t part of the original bonds. But for political and legal reasons, it’s inconvenient to declare a default. Instead, the Europeans call the write-down “private-sector involvement,” or PSI. How reassuring.

Europe’s problem is to prevent Greece’s fate from befalling any of the other 16 countries using the euro — most obviously, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy, but also Belgium and France. If investors believe that default (or PSI) is unavoidable, they will desert the debts of these countries. A financial implosion could become unavoidable. …

Mark Steyn calls our attention to the need for the government to provide diapers.

Last Thursday was officially “Diaper Need Awareness Day” in the state of Connecticut. Were you aware of it? There are so many awareness-raising days, it’s hard to keep track. Maybe we could have an Awareness-Raising Day Awareness Day. At any rate, the first annual Diaper Need Awareness Day was proclaimed by Dan Malloy, governor of the Nutmeg State, and they had a big old awareness-raising get-together in New Haven. It’s not clear yet whether they’ve got an official ribbon. We’re running a bit low on ribbon colors these days: It’s not just pink ribbons for breast cancer, but also teal for agoraphobia, periwinkle for acid reflux, pink and blue ribbons for amniotic fluid embolisms, and pinstripe ribbons for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. We could use a Ribbon-Hue Awareness Day to raise awareness about how we’re falling behind in the race for more ribbon colors.

If you’re wondering what sentient being isn’t aware of diapers, you’re missing the point: Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro is raising awareness of the need for diapers in order to, as Politico reported, “push the Federal Government to provide free diapers to poor families.” Congresswoman DeLauro has introduced the “DIAPER” Act – that’s to say, the Diaper Investment and Aid to Promote Economic Recovery Act Act. So don’t worry, it’s not welfare, it’s “stimulus.” As Fox News put it, “A U.S. congresswoman in Connecticut wants to boost the economy by offering free diapers to low-income families.” And, given that sinking bazillions of dollars into green-jobs schemes to build eco-cars in Finland and a federal program to buy guns for Mexican drug cartels and all the other fascinating innovations of the Obama administration haven’t worked, who’s to say borrowing money from the Chinese Politburo and sticking it in your kid’s diaper isn’t the kind of outside-the-box thinking that won’t do the trick?

Bart Hinkle compares Obama to Hoover. 

Last week the White House picked a Virginia fire station as the venue for the president’s principal campaign stop—er, legislative sales pitch. The choice was apt. At roughly the same time the president was lamenting how “cities and states like Michigan and New Jersey . . . have had to lay off big chunks of their forces,” Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid declared, “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers.”

Oh. Guess you can go home now, Wall Street occupiers! All those unemployment reports? False alarms.

To be fair to Reid—which may be more than he deserves—he was defending the part of the American Jobs Act that would appropriate $35 billion for state and local government hiring. That might help offset the savage cuts of the past year, except for one thing: The cuts have not been that savage. From September of last year to this past month, state and local payrolls have shrunk by 260,000 positions out of more than 20 million. That comes to roughly 1 percent of the work force.

The situation looks much worse for the private sector. It has added jobs at an anemic rate in the past few months, but it still has far to go before it claws its way back to the employment peak of November 2007. At that time total non-government employment stood at 124 million. It’s now 109 million. …

The constant campaigning gets comment from Karl Rove.

According to Mark Knoller, CBS Radio News White House Correspondent, President Obama has attended 60 campaign fund-raisers this year. That’s one every four days since he kicked off his re-election on April 4. By comparison at this point in 2003, President George W. Bush had appeared at only 28 fund-raisers.

Mr. Obama has done more than lap Mr. Bush in raising campaign cash. He’s also already eagerly barnstorming critical battleground states via Air Force One or Bus One. His goal is another term, though his ostensible reason for the trips is to push for passage of Stimulus II.

His renewed enthusiasm shows that nothing rejuvenates this president more than leaving Oval Office duties behind to reprise his role as stump speaker. We’re even seeing snappy new slogans: the latest is “We can’t wait,” a clever way to hide Mr. Obama’s discomfort with the business of convincing Congress to pass his bills.

This slogan unintentionally showcases an essential truth about the Obama presidency: comfortable on the political hustings, he’s uncomfortable doing the job. Energetic at campaigning, he’s lethargic at governing. From the start of his administration, he has left the policy details and heavy lifting to others. …

According to Charlie Gasparino, the Occupy Wall Street thugs have friends in the executive suite.

… the elite media has constantly vilified the peaceful Tea Party as right-wing rabble for prodding politicians to do nothing more than reduce the bloat of government.

Meanwhile, politicians, the press — and now CEOs — have generally celebrated Occupy Wall Street as the second coming of the civil-rights movement — no matter how many times its followers have clashed with police in the name of Mao and Che Guevara.

And the worst part about these unfair depictions of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street?

There’s no end in sight.

I can’t remember a single instance in which the chief executive of a major bank or conglomerate has said something nice about the Tea Party’s goals of limited government, lower taxes and free markets — the very things upon which this country was founded.

But such business leaders as GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt and Blackrock chief Larry Fink have been falling all over themselves trying to say nice things about the OWS protesters, their grievances and rants against capitalism — even while the unwashed mob is nearly rioting not far from their corporate headquarters. …

Journal article has new revelations about dogs and humans. 

Chauvet Cave in southern France houses the oldest representational paintings ever discovered. Created some 32,000 years ago, the 400-plus images of large grazing animals and the predators who hunted them form a multi-chambered Paleolithic bestiary. Many scholars believe that these paintings mark the emergence of a recognizably modern human consciousness. We feel that we know their creators, even though they are from a time and place as alien as another planet.

What most intrigues many people about the cave, however, is not the artwork but a set of markings at once more human and more mysterious: the bare footprints of an 8- to 10-year-old torch-bearing boy left in the mud of a back chamber some 26,000 years ago—and, alongside one of them, the paw print of his traveling companion, variously identified as a wolf or a large dog.

Attributing that paw print to a dog or even to a socialized wolf has been controversial since it was first proposed a decade ago. It would push back by some 12,000 years the oldest dog on record. More than that: Along with a cascade of other new scientific findings, it could totally rewrite the story of man and dog and what they mean to each other. …

Cool map of the scary things in the United States from Pleated Jeans.

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David Warren wishes to point out some problems with the end in Libya. 

One marvels, in retrospect, at the order the U.S. military brought to Iraq, wherein Saddam Hussein was brought to his trial alive and intact. For, while one may not care very much whether murderous tyrants receive all the gracious attentions of correct legal procedure, it is nevertheless impressive when the task is attempted, and even more when it succeeds.

I think the first thing to notice about the end of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, is that America has changed. Vice-President Joe Biden was quickly boasting that Gadhafi had been brought to a conclusion for just $2 billion (an unlikely estimate), and without the loss of a single American life. By extension, he mocked the Bush administration for the trouble and expense of bringing down Saddam.

The affair in Libya, we are told by liberal experts, offers a new model for “regime change,” and in his Rose Garden remarks, President Barack Obama was quick to warn (without naming) Syria’s Bashar al-Assad that he could be next. The media have been generally gloating with him, at what they interpret as a foreign-policy success.

But what is the message of Gadhafi’s demise to other monstrous tyrants? If we think for a moment, we will realize that it is unambiguous: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The important thing, for them, is now not to relinquish power; and the faster and more decisively they apply brutal measures against their own domestic opponents, the better their chances of avoiding Gadhafi’s fate. …

Christopher Hitchens also has reservations.

… At the close of an obscene regime, especially one that has shown it would rather destroy society and the state than surrender power, it is natural for people to hope for something like an exorcism. It is satisfying to see the cadaver of the monster and be sure that he can’t come back. It is also reassuring to know that there is no hateful figurehead on whom some kind of “werewolf” resistance could converge in order to prolong the misery and atrocity. But Qaddafi at the time of his death was wounded and out of action and at the head of a small group of terrified riff-raff. He was unable to offer any further resistance. And all the positive results that I cited above could have been achieved by the simple expedient of taking him first to a hospital, then to a jail, and thence to the airport. Indeed, a spell in the dock would probably hugely enhance the positive impact, since those poor lost souls who still put their trust in the man could scarcely have their illusions survive the exposure to even a few hours of the madman’s gibberings in court.

And so the new Libya begins, but it begins with a squalid lynching. News correspondents have been quite warm and vocal lately, about the general forbearance shown by the rebels to the persons and property of the Qaddafi loyalists. That makes it even more regrettable that the principle could not be honored in its main instance. At the time of writing, Seif-al-Islam Qaddafi, one of Muammar’s sons, is said to be still at large. It will be quite a disgrace if he is also killed out of hand, or if at the very least the NTC and the international community do not remind their fighters that he needs to be taken into lawful custody. …

Just how hateful have the Turks become? Jonathan Tobin has the answer.

How determined is Turkey to repudiate its decades-long alliance with Israel? Today’s decision by the Turks to reportedly refuse assistance from Israel is a stunning indication of how far the Islamist government in Ankara is willing to go to make a point.

More than 1,000 persons are feared dead in the aftermath of a quake that measured 7.2 on the Richter scale. With workers battling to save those trapped in collapsed buildings in towns and cities near the Iranian border, it’s more than likely that Israel’s experienced rescue teams — which participated in previous earthquake relief efforts in Turkey — would be of value to the effort. But according to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an has told the Israelis they are not wanted. Erdo?an would apparently prefer to see his compatriots die rather than to allow Jews to help them. …

Telegraph, UK’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard with an upbeat look at our country’s prospects. 

The American phoenix is slowly rising again. Within five years or so, the US will be well on its way to self-sufficiency in fuel and energy. Manufacturing will have closed the labour gap with China in a clutch of key industries. The current account might even be in surplus.

Assumptions that the Great Republic must inevitably spiral into economic and strategic decline – so like the chatter of the late 1980s, when Japan was in vogue – will seem wildly off the mark by then.

Telegraph readers already know about the “shale gas revolution” that has turned America into the world’s number one producer of natural gas, ahead of Russia.

Less known is that the technology of hydraulic fracturing – breaking rocks with jets of water – will also bring a quantum leap in shale oil supply, mostly from the Bakken fields in North Dakota, Eagle Ford in Texas, and other reserves across the Mid-West.

“The US was the single largest contributor to global oil supply growth last year, with a net 395,000 barrels per day (b/d),” said Francisco Blanch from Bank of America, comparing the Dakota fields to a new North Sea.

Total US shale output is “set to expand dramatically” as fresh sources come on stream, possibly reaching 5.5m b/d by mid-decade. This is a tenfold rise since 2009.

The US already meets 72pc of its own oil needs, up from around 50pc a decade ago. …

David Harsanyi thinks the Dems have some silly ideas.

… For example, Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. recently claimed that the iPad was “responsible for eliminating thousands of jobs,” you know, just like the modern-day automated loom. What, he wonders, will happen to “all the jobs associated with paper?” Surely, a remark as deeply juvenile as that one matches anything offered by those wild-eyed skeptics.

Or take President Barack Obama, who earlier this year — and not for the first time — claimed that “structural issues with our economy” have nothing to do with politicians. The problem, in his opinion, is that “a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient,” making the workforce smaller. “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM. You don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”

Those aren’t structural issues; they are productivity issues. And rather than kill jobs, efficiency drives output and growth and improves performance and the quality of goods and services — along with our lives. Perhaps if this administration weren’t busy trying to create morally pleasing but temporary and unsustainable jobs through bailouts, subsidies and “stimulus,” we could all hit that ATM more often. …

Bjorn Lomberg thinks it is wrong for the government to try to pick green energy winners.

… Make no mistake, the long road to ending reliance on fossil fuels will be littered with many technologies that fail to live up to early promise. But the danger is when politicians and bureaucrats attempt to predict which technologies will be winners and back them to build an industry.

The idea of capturing the sun’s power through solar cylinders might have been a great idea, but the government should instead have spent half a million dollars on funding researchers to investigate such technology. If the research had proved the technology successful, private companies would have jumped in and sold cheap solar power to the world. And spending one-thousandth of the amount on research means we could have studied many potentially promising technologies — because Solyndra is hardly a unique case. …

William McGurn says each new child born in the world is a blessing. 

Nothing brings out the inner Malthus like a newborn baby.

That’s especially true when that baby is born to a mother somewhere in Africa or Asia. According to the United Nations Population Fund, some time this coming Monday, probably in India, the world will welcome its seven billionth person. Well, maybe welcome isn’t exactly the right word.

At Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs tells CNN “the consequences for humanity could be grim.” Earlier this year, a New York Times columnist declared “the earth is full,” suggesting that a growing population means “we are eating into our future.” And in West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette editorializes about a “human swarm” that is “overbreeding” in a way that “prosperous, well-educated families” from the developed world do not.

The smarter ones acknowledge that Malthus’s ominous warnings about a growing population outstripping the food supply were not borne out in his day. The track record for these scares in our own day is not much better. Perhaps the most famous was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 “The Population Bomb,” which opened with these sunny sentences: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

The book was wildly popular, and the assertions large. India was so hopeless he advocated a policy of “triage” that would just let them die. In fact, the mass starvation he predicted never materialized, and the Indians whom he thought could never feed themselves are now eating better than ever despite a population more than twice the size it was when “The Population Bomb” appeared. …

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Fred and Kimberley Kagan are not fans of the Iraq withdrawal.

Today, President Obama declared the successful completion of his strategy to remove all American military forces from Iraq by the end of the year. He said: “[E]nsuring the success of this strategy has been one of my highest national security priorities” since taking office. “Over the next two months, our troops in Iraq, tens of thousands of them, will pack up their gear and board convoys for the journey home. The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops. That is how America’s military effort in Iraq will end.” In other words, our efforts in Iraq end neither in victory nor defeat, success nor failure, but simply in retreat.

The humiliation of this retreat is compounded by the dishonesty of its presentation. Today, President Obama claimed that the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq was the centerpiece of the strategy he has been pursuing there since taking office. But that was not the sole or even primary objective of the strategy he announced five weeks after becoming president. At Camp Lejeune in February 2009, to an audience of Marines, he declared: …

Dittos from Jennifer Rubin.

It is hard to know which is worse: the irresponsibility of a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces in Iraq or the sheer dishonesty with which it was presented. For now I will focus on the latter.

Josh Rogin explains that the president simply lied when he explained that the withdrawal was the successful culmination of his Iraq policy. In fact it was borne of necessity as a result of the administration’s inept negotiations:

The Obama administration is claiming it always intended to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year, in line with the president’s announcement today, but in fact several parts of the administration appeared to try hard to negotiate a deal for thousands of troops to remain — and failed. . . . …

According to Ed Morrissey it looks like the NY Times takes a dim view also.

When Barack Obama announced yesterday that all US troops would return from Iraq, he framed it as a campaign promise kept, although Obama promised to pull the troops out in 16 months and ended up sticking with the timeline set by George Bush instead.  He also neglected to mention that his administration had spent the last several months trying to avoid the outcome he proudly proclaimed.  This morning, the New York Times makes clear that neither side wanted a full withdrawal from Iraq, and that the collapse in negotiations came as a result of bungling by the White House:

“President Obama’s announcement on Friday that all American troops would leave Iraq by the end of the year was an occasion for celebration for many, but some top American military officials were dismayed by the announcement, seeing it as the president’s putting the best face on a breakdown in tortured negotiations with the Iraqis.

And for the negotiators who labored all year to avoid that outcome, it represented the triumph of politics over the reality of Iraq’s fragile security’s requiring some troops to stay, a fact everyone had assumed would prevail … ”

The European debt crisis is getting worse according to James Pethokoukis.

Do you think this month’s stock market rebound means Americans can stop worrying about the EU debt crisis? (One big bank estimates a full-on financial crisis over there could send U.S. unemployment to 12 percent.)

If so, I have some terrible news for you. AEI’s Desmond Lachman makes the case that the terrifying case that Euro Crisis is actually intensifying:

1. The Greek economy now appears to be in virtual freefall as indicated by a 12 percent contraction in real GDP over the past two years and an increase in the unemployment rate to over 15 percent. This makes a substantial write down of Greece’s US$450 billion sovereign debt highly probable within the next few months. Such a default would constitute the largest sovereign debt default on record.

2. Contagion from the Greek debt crisis is affecting not simply the smaller economies of Ireland and Portugal, which too have solvency problems. It is now also impacting Italy and Spain, Europe’s third and fourth largest economies, respectively. This poses a real threat to the Euro’s survival in its present form. …

Interesting piece in Forbes on the red state in your future.

Voters around the country are concluding it’s better to be red than dead—applying a whole meaning to an old phrase.  If you do not currently live in a red state, there’s a good chance you will be in the near future.  Either you will flee to a red state or a red state will come to you—because voters fed up with blue-state fiscal irresponsibility will elect candidates who promise to pass red-state policies.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), 25 state legislatures are controlled by Republicans and 16 by Democrats, with eight split (i.e., each party controlling one house).  There are 29 Republican governors and 20 Democrats, with one independent.  And there are 20 states where Republicans control both the legislature and governor’s mansion vs. 11 Democratic, with 18 split (one party controls the governor’s office and the other the legislature).

And though we are a year away from the 2012 election, generic Republican vs. Democratic polls have given Republicans the edge for more than a year.  If that pattern holds—and if blue-state leaders refuse to learn from their policy mistakes, just like their true-blue leader in the White House—it likely means there will be even more red states in 2013. …

According to Legal Insurrection blog, Rhode Island may be the first state to tank. Follow the links to the NY Times article.

You know about the RI pension mess, because I’ve been pounding that issue pretty much since the founding of this blog three years ago.

The New York Times takes a devastating look at Rhode Island, The Little State With a Big Mess (h/t @amandacarpenter):

ON the night of Sept. 8, Gina M. Raimondo, a financier by trade, rolled up here with news no one wanted to hear: Rhode Island, she declared, was going broke.

Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow. But if current trends held, Ms. Raimondo warned, the Ocean State would soon look like Athens on the Narragansett: undersized and overextended. Its economy would wither. Jobs would vanish. The state would be hollowed out.

It is not the sort of message you might expect from Ms. Raimondo, a proud daughter of Providence, a successful venture capitalist and, not least, the current general treasurer of Rhode Island. But it is a message worth hearing. The smallest state in the union, it turns out, has a very big debt problem.

After decades of drift, denial and inaction, Rhode Island’s $14.8 billion pension system is in crisis. Ten cents of every state tax dollar now goes to retired public workers. Before long, Ms. Raimondo has been cautioning in whistle-stops here and across the state, that figure will climb perilously toward 20 cents….

In some ways, the central question is not only what the government owes to pensioners but what citizens owe to one another.

That last sentence hits the nail on the head.  In Rhode Island, the citizenry is being asked to spend increasing percentages of its income and assets not for the general welfare, but for the welfare of a relatively small percentage of the population who have state and municipal pensions.

It’s often joked that General Motors is a pension plan which makes automobiles.  Rhode Island is in worse shape.  Rhode Island is becoming a public sector pension plan which doesn’t make anything.

CNBC says state debt may top $4 trillion.

The total of U.S. state debt, including pension liabilities, could surpass $4 trillion, with California owing the most and Vermont owing the least, a new analysis says.

The nonprofit State Budget Solutions combined states’ major debt and future liabilities, primarily for pensions and employee healthcare, unemployment insurance loans, outstanding bonds and projected fiscal 2011 budget gaps. It found that in total, states are in debt for $4.2 trillion.

The group, which follows state fiscal conditions and advocates for limited spending and taxes, said the deficit calculations that states make “do not offer a full picture of the states’ liabilities and can rely on budget gimmicks and accounting games to hide the extent of the deficit.”

The housing bust, financial crisis and economic recession caused states’ tax revenue to plunge, and huge holes have emerged in their budgets over the last few years. Because all states except Vermont must end their fiscal years with balanced budgets, states have scrambled to cut spending, hike taxes, borrow and turn to the federal government for help.

Taxpayers are worried the states’ poor fiscal health will persist for a long time and some Republicans in Congress have questioned whether the situation is worse than the states say. …

The Chicago Tribune has an example of how states got in this mess.

Two lobbyists with no prior teaching experience were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found.

Steven Preckwinkle, the political director for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and fellow union lobbyist David Piccioli were the only people who took advantage of a small window opened by lawmakers a few months earlier.

The legislation enabled union officials to get into the state teachers pension fund and count their previous years as union employees after quickly obtaining teaching certificates and working in a classroom. They just had to do it before the bill was signed into law.

Preckwinkle’s one day of subbing qualified him to become a participant in the state teachers pension fund, allowing him to pick up 16 years of previous union work and nearly five more years since he joined. He’s 59, and at age 60 he’ll be eligible for a state pension based on the four-highest consecutive years of his last 10 years of work.

His paycheck fluctuates as a union lobbyist, but pension records show his earnings in the last school year were at least $245,000. Based on his salary history so far, he could earn a pension of about $108,000 a year, more than double what the average teacher receives.

His pay for one day as a substitute was $93, according to records of the Illinois Teachers Retirement System. …

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Joe Nocera, in the NY Times, of all places, says the Bork nomination fight was the beginning of ugly in politics.

On Oct. 23, 1987 — 24 years ago on Sunday — Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was voted down by the Senate. All but two Democrats voted “nay.”

The rejection of a Supreme Court nominee is unusual but not unheard of (see Clement Haynsworth Jr.). But rarely has a failed nominee had the pedigree — and intellectual firepower — of Bork. He had been a law professor at Yale, the solicitor general of the United States and, at the time Ronald Reagan tapped him for the court, a federal appeals court judge.

Moreover, Bork was a legal intellectual, a proponent of original intent and judicial restraint. The task of the judge, he once wrote, is “to discern how the framers’ values, defined in the context of the world they knew, apply to the world we know.” He said that Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, was a “wholly unjustifiable judicial usurpation” of authority that belonged to the states, that the court’s recent rulings on affirmative action were problematic and that the First Amendment didn’t apply to pornography.

Whatever you think of these views, they cannot be fairly characterized as extreme; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among many others, has questioned the rationale offered by the court to justify Roe v. Wade. Nor was Bork himself an extremist. He was a strongly opinionated, somewhat pugnacious, deeply conservative judge. (At 84 today, he hasn’t mellowed much either, to judge from an interview he recently gave Newsweek.)

I bring up Bork not only because Sunday is a convenient anniversary. His nomination battle is also a reminder that our poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be — and have been — every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.

I’ll take it one step further. The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics. …

Hot Air post on Jindal’s big win on Saturday.

Say, did you hear about the big election yesterday? Well, if you’re like the majority of the country, you probably weren’t even aware anyone was voting on Saturday. But for the politically addicted, you might have known that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was up for another term. So… how did that work out for him? Not too shabby. …

Writing in the Las Vegas paper, Sherman Frederick says Harry Reid is nuts.

Harry Reid is showing up the Occupy Wall Street protesters. He takes crazy talk to a whole new level.

Last week, the bard of Searchlight stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate. In front of C-SPAN and everybody, he said — and I’m not making this up — “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs are doing just fine. It’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers.”

And all the good people of Nevada, along with all the wild horses, cattle, ground squirrels and sheep, lifted their heads and said: “Is Harry Reid out of his ever-loving mind?”

Nevada’s economy has been missing for so long it’s pictured on the side of milk cartons. And free-spending, deficit-hiking Harry Reid is listed as the No. 1 suspect.

When Harry tells the nation to “go left” economically, Nevadans instinctively lean to the right.

If being wrong were an art, Harry Reid’s work would be on display at the Louvre. …

The great thinkers or Washington have dealt us another mess; this time student loans. NY Post has the story.

Three years after the housing-market meltdown, a college education may be the next part of the American Dream to turn into a nightmare.

For the first time, Americans owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit-card bills, with a tally that could soon top $1 trillion — leaving millions of Americans with a crushing debt burden at a time when decent-paying jobs are scarce.

“I’ve paid on my student loans, but I owe just as much as when I started,” says Laura Pounders, 56, who went back to college 16 years ago in hopes of securing a higher-paying job than the two she had.

“It makes me cringe when I hear politicians say we need people to go to college. Why? So you can accrue $50,000 in debt and get a job that pays $8 an hour? I’m going to die with this debt.”

John Smith, 31, of Brooklyn, works part time at a Trader Joe’s because he hasn’t found work in his field for over a year, despite having a master’s degree. He has about $45,000 in student loan debt. His girlfriend, Meropi Peponides, 27, a graduate student at Columbia University, will have over $50,000 by the time she graduates. …

Patrick Michaels writes about the green energy crack-up.

History — of the U.S., Europe, the U.K. and its former dominions — repeatedly shows that environmental protection is a luxury good.  When per-capita income reaches some threshold, the citizenry tire of opaque air and sleazy waters,  various agencies and permanent bureaucracies sprout, and, as long as times are good, regulation is good.

Our friends in the U.K. and Europe are especially green.  Just hop off the plane in London and pick up the papers.  Global warming is everywhere, and, for decades, the religion’s been that carbon dioxide reductions are fine, virtuous, and they’re going to make everyone rich. I have a social security system I would like to sell them.

This all splatters to a halt when economies go south.  And the crash can be especially jarring if greenness is one of the causes.  Thanks in no small part to the debacle in Europe, in a very few recent weeks, we have witnessed the great green crack-up.

Admittedly, the first glimmers showed up a couple of years ago in Spain, which suffered the malady of economic miasma brought on by environmental populism. …  

Because he is such a good writer, and because the embarrassing quotes from Jackie were so off-the-wall, we have Andrew Ferguson’s take on the latest from the Kennedy BS machine.

Is there a more empathetic person in the world than Diane Sawyer, the top newsreader at ABC TV? I’m sure there must be—around seven billion of them, probably. But is there anyone who looks more empathetic than Diane Sawyer? Not a chance. When she peers at you through the camera she has the look of someone who’s just seen your lab results and is trying to figure out how to break the bad news. It must be terribly unnerving to see it close up, firsthand, in person—especially while she’s sitting next to you on a couch, no less.

I give Caroline Kennedy a lot of credit for retaining her composure with those two moist peepers trained in on her. This was during a long interview conducted for a two-hour TV special that ABC aired September 13 called Jacqueline Kennedy: In Her Own Words. (Diane Sawyer told us the proper pronunciation of Mrs. Kennedy’s first name is “Zsock-leen,” though everybody called her Jackie, which must have made life less embarrassing.) The special was the trumpet blast alerting the nation to the publication of another product of the Kennedy apparat, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. The book consists of previously unheard interviews Mrs. Kennedy gave Arthur Schlesinger in early 1964—eight CDs’ worth. 

Every time you think that the Kennedy apparat is dead, there’s some new burst of publicity that makes you realize it’s st …ill humming, or at least wheezing. These guys know how to move units. Here in the twenty-first century, in keeping with contemporary “best practices,” a good deal of the work previously done by Kennedy toadies—court historians, speechwriters, bagmen, PR wizards—has been outsourced, and ABC is one of the chief contractors. For 36 hours the network became the Zsock-leen Channel, from Good Morning America to Nightline, and a week later, Historic Conversations was the bestselling book in the country.

The apparat continues work begun by the patriarch, Joe Kennedy, in the 1930s. One of his first moves was to hire Hollywood cinematographers to record the everyday doings (staged) of his toothy and, in a few cases, toothsome children, in Technicolor, on 35mm film. The scenes were then inventoried and cross-tabulated by activity and Kennedy kid—Touch Football w/Eunice, Part xxxvii; Touch Football w/Eunice, Part xxxviii—and stored in a flameproof warehouse in the Bronx. It was destroyed by fire, and the film canisters went up with it. That damn Kennedy curse. 

The photographers kept at it, needless to say, and the stills and movies produced over the course of half a century are essential to the Kennedy mystique.

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Mark Steyn reacts to the administration’s endless need to spend money we don’t have.

… It’s just about possible to foresee, say, Iceland or Ireland getting its spending under control. But, when a nation of 300 million people presumes to determine grade-school hiring and almost everything else through an ever more centralized bureaucracy, you’re setting yourself up for waste on a scale unknown to history. For example, under the Obama “stimulus,” U.S. taxpayers gave a $529 million loan guarantee to the company Fisker to build their Karma electric car. At a factory in Finland.

If you’re wondering how giving half-a-billion dollars to a Finnish factory stimulates the U.S. economy, well, what’s a lousy half-bil in a multitrillion-dollar sinkhole? Besides, in the 2009 global rankings, Finnish schoolkids placed sixth in math, third in reading and second in science, while suffering under the burden of a per-student budget half that of York City. By comparison, America placed 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in math. So the good news is that, by using U.S. government money to fund a factory in Finland, Fisker may be able to hire workers smart enough to figure out how to build an unwanted electric car that doesn’t lose its entire U.S. taxpayer investment.

In a sane world, Joe Biden’s remarks would be greeted by derisive laughter, even by fourth-graders. Certainly by Finnish fourth-graders.

Peter Ferrara in Forbes notes how the people are being ignored. 

In 2010, the American people delivered a stinging rebuke to President Obama.  The 63 seat Republican gain in the House was a New Deal size landslide, harking back to a time when America was choosing a fundamental change of course.  In the Senate, Republicans came back from a minority unable to even mount a filibuster to within three seats of the Democrats, after some party infighting fumbled away a couple of quite possible wins.

For Democrats, that does not bode well for a 2012 election with 23 Democrat Senate seats at stake, and a filibuster proof Republican majority possible by winning only half of those.  The people elected these Republicans in 2010 to stop the emergent Obama agenda, not to cooperate in its advancement.

But President Barack Obama refused to heed the people and change course.  The election results only changed the means by which he has pursued the most left wing policies of any President in U.S. history.  Recognizing that he could no longer advance his agenda through Congress, Obama pivoted to maximizing the vast regulatory powers of the Executive Branch.

For example, since cap and trade legislation obviously no longer had any prayer of getting through Congress (even the overwhelmingly Democrat Congress of 2009-2010 wouldn’t pass it), Obama said after the election, “Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way.  It was a means, not an end.”  Sometimes this pivot has involved ignoring legal rulings, breaking agreements with Congress, and exceeding statutory authority. …

National Journal reports on a retiring Dem slamming the administration.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., announced his retirement from Congress this afternoon — and he issued a scathing parting shot at President Obama’s track record on his way out.

In a statement explaining his decision, Cardoza, a leader of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, said he was “dismayed” by the administration’s “failure to understand and effectively address the current housing foreclosure crisis.”

“Home foreclosures are destroying communities and crushing our economy, and the Administration’s inaction is infuriating,” Cardoza said.

A former chairman of the moderate Blue Dog Caucus, Cardoza also bemoaned the increasing partisanship in Washington, and blamed the media for fueling the ideological divide in the country, not giving enough attention to moderates. …

Alana Goodman posts on Obama’s Carter-like poll numbers.

Obama is getting down to the wire. There is a strong historical correlation between where a president’s approval ratings are around this point in his presidency, and whether he goes on to win a second term. And yet there’s no indication that Obama’s approval ratings are improving. In fact, Gallup finds that his 11th quarter numbers are the worst of Obama’s presidency–as well as the worst of any recent president except Jimmy Carter?:

“Only one elected president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, had a lower 11th quarter average than Obama. Carter averaged 31% during his 11th quarter, which was marked by a poor economy and high energy prices. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were the only other post-World War II presidents whose job approval averages were below 50% in their 11th quarter in office.”

According to Gallup’s analysis, “an incumbent president’s 12th- and 13th-quarter averages give a strong indication of whether he will win a second term.” So the crucial test is whether Obama can perk up his approval ratings between now and January. …

Peter Wehner wants to know when the anti-Semitism of the Occupy group will be criticized by the president.

During one of the GOP presidential debates, two or three people in an audience of more than 5,000 booed a question posed by a gay soldier, not the gay soldier himself. As one might expect, though, many journalists, as well as the president, decided to make a big deal of this. It was held up as an example of Republican bigotry. President Civility, Barack Obama, decided to put his own interpretation on things:

‘ “We  don’t believe in the kind of smallness that says it’s OK for a stage full of political leaders — one of whom could end up being the president of the United States — being silent when an American soldier is booed,” Obama said at a Human Rights Campaign dinner. ‘

To repeat: the soldier was not booed; his question was. But no matter; Obama had political points to score and a base to energize. Yet with the precedent Obama is setting in place, I do wonder: The Occupy Wall Street movement is rife with anti-Semitism. The statements we’re hearing from the protesters are vile, ugly and seemingly endless. And yet this is a movement Obama, Vice President Biden, Minority Leader Pelosi, and DNC chairwoman Wasserman Schultz have all warmly embraced. Revealingly, they have yet to denounce the unvarnished anti-Semitism they must be aware of by now. ‘

I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe in the kind of smallness that says it’s OK for a president and Democratic leaders – including one who could end up being re-elected as president of the United States – being silent when a movement they have praised and are provoking is spewing forth anti-Semitic bile on a daily basis. It would be nice, and exceedingly rare, for the president to show even a spark of moral leadership.

If he’s not careful, one might begin to (reasonably) conclude the president isn’t terribly bothered by anti-Semitism. Because if he were, he would actually speak out against it. Even once.

Investor’s.com editors want the GOP contenders to pin the mortgage mess on the government.

If Republicans are to take back the White House and Senate, they need to do a better job tying Democrats and Washington to the subprime crisis. It’s not hard, yet even their front-runner struggles to make the case.

On Wednesday night, CNN host Piers Morgan guilted Cain into allowing that banks were, as Morgan put it, “effectively preying on the most vulnerable elements of American society,” and that Wall Street deserves at least partial blame for the crisis and should be held to account. “I wouldn’t defend the banks,” Cain said, “because I happen to think that the banks are part of the problem. Wall Street is.”

Cain belatedly also faulted Fannie and Freddie, and the Democrats in Washington who protected them. Piers then pressed him to come up with a pie chart alloting blame — Washington vs. Wall Street—and Cain assigned neither a majority responsibility for the mess.

But based on the number of toxic loans in the system in 2008, the government was responsible for not just a simple majority, but more than two-thirds. It’s quantifiable — 71% to be exact (see chart). And the remaining 29% of private-label junk was mostly attributable to Countrywide Financial, which was under the heel of HUD and its “fair-lending” edicts. …

New York Magazine reports on the Occupy folks turning towards Animal Farm. Next will they turn towards Lord of the Flies?

All occupiers are equal — but some occupiers are more equal than others. In wind-whipped Zuccotti Park, new divisions and hierarchies are threatening to upend Occupy Wall Street and its leaderless collective.

As the protest has grown, some of the occupiers have spontaneously taken charge on projects large and small. But many of the people in Zuccotti Park aren’t taking direction well, leading to a tense Thursday of political disagreements, the occasional shouting match, and at least one fistfight.

It began, as it so often does, with a drum circle. The ten-hour groove marathons weren’t sitting well with the neighborhood’s community board, the ironically situated High School of Economics and Finance that sits on the corner of Zuccotti Park, or many of the sleep-deprived protesters.

“[The high school] couldn’t teach,” explained Josh Nelson, a 27-year-old occupier from Nebraska. “And we’ve had issues with the drummers too. They drum incessantly all day, and really loud.” Facilitators spearheaded a General Assembly proposal to limit the drumming to two hours a day. “The drumming is a major issue which has the potential to get us kicked out,” said Lauren Digion, a leader on the sanitation working group.

But the drums were fun. They brought in publicity and money. Many non-facilitators were infuriated by the decision and claimed that it had been forced through the General Assembly.

“They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music,” said Seth Harper, an 18-year-old from Georgia. “The GA decided to do it … they suppressed people’s opinions. I wanted to do introduce a different proposal, but a big black organizer chick with an Afro said I couldn’t.” …

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Streetwise Professor says if Occupy Wall Street wants to do some good they might consider occupying Fannie and Freddie.

It is passing strange–or maybe not–that the OWS crowd/mob is giving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a pass.  They are the best example of an unseemly nexus between government and business.  Look at the guys who were their CEOs and board members over the years.  Democratic Party stalwart–and Obama BFF–James Johnson, who walked away with a cool $200 mil.  Former Clinton appointees Jamie Gorelick and Franklin Raines.  Bill Daley.  All of whom did very, very well feeding at the GSE teat.

Us?  Not so much.  For those of you keeping score at home, the tab for F&F is now $169 billion.  And the meter is still running: current estimates are for an additional $51 billion in losses over the next 10 years.  That’s $220 billion for you OWS types who majored in sociology. …

Charles Krauthammer comments on the latest debate.

On Tuesday night, seismologists at the Las Vegas Oceanographic Institute reported the first recorded movement of a hair on Mitt Romney’s head. Although it was only one follicle, displaced a mere 1.2 centimeters, the tremors were felt from Iowa to New Hampshire. Simultaneously, these same scientists detected signs of life in Rick Perry, last seen comatose at the recent Dartmouth debate.

Such were the highlights of Tuesday’s seven-person Republican brawl at the Venetian. To be sure, there were other developments: Herman Cain stumbled, Newt Gingrich grinned, Rick Santorum landed a clean shot at Romneycare and Michele Bachmann made a spirited bid for a comeback.

But the main event was the scripted Perry attack on Romney, reprising the old charge of Romney hiring illegal immigrants. Perry’s face-to-face accusation of rank hypocrisy had the intended effect. From the ensuing melee emerged a singularity: a ruffled Romney, face flushed, voice raised. …

McCain campaign aide on why he hated the debates and why they’re useful. 

When the 2008 presidential election ended in defeat for my candidate, John McCain, I was consoled by the knowledge I would never again have to be involved in a candidate debate. I hated them.

For seemingly endless stretches, it felt like the chief activities of our campaign were helping our candidate prepare for debates, pacing anxiously in holding rooms while he slugged it out on stage with his opponents, and arguing about the results after they were over. Why, I often wondered, had we ever agreed to do so many of the damn things?

The biggest winners of those contrived contests were the sponsoring cable news networks that showcased themselves and boosted their ratings at the expense of the miserable candidates and their staff.

Debates have become the most important function of the campaigns for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, and my sympathies go out to all the candidates and their teams. …

USA Today OpEd thinks Romney is in the lead.

Mitt Romney is the equivalent of the Republicans’ backup prom date, the standby if no better offer comes along.

Will the candidate who has always been near the head of the pack but never run away with the nomination, a man who is not always in step with an anxious and anti-establishment GOP base, get into the big dance with President Obama because Romney is perceived as the Republican most able to beat Obama in 2012?

Republican primary voters “are in a rebellious mood and Mitt Romney is not a rebellious candidate,” said the Pew Research Center’s Andrew Kohut.

Yet a CNN poll Oct. 14-16 said 41% of Republicans believed that Romney had the best chance of beating Obama next year. Herman Cain was a distant second at 24%. And 51% said they expected Romney to be their party’s 2012 nominee.

WSJ OpEd by John Yoo celebrates 20 years of Justice Thomas. 

This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court. In his first two decades on the bench, Justice Thomas has established himself as the original Constitution’s greatest defender against elite efforts at social engineering. His stances for limited government and individual freedom make him the left’s lightning rod and the tea party’s intellectual godfather. And he is only halfway through the 40 years he may sit on the high court.

Justice Thomas’s two decades on the bench show the simple power of ideas over the pettiness of our politics. Media and academic elites have spent the last 20 years trying to marginalize him by drawing a portrait of a man stung by his confirmation, angry at his rejection by the civil rights community, and a blind follower of fellow conservatives. But Justice Thomas has broken through this partisan fog to convince the court to adopt many of his positions, and to become a beacon to the grass-roots movement to restrain government spending and reduce the size of the welfare state.

Clarence Thomas set the table for the tea party by making originalism fashionable again. Many appointees to the court enjoy its role as arbiter of society’s most divisive questions—race, abortion, religion, gay rights and national security—and show little desire to control their own power. Antonin Scalia, at best, thinks interpreting the Constitution based on its original meaning is “the lesser evil,” as he wrote in a 1989 law journal article, because it prevents judges from pursuing their own personal policies. Justice Thomas, however, thinks that the meaning of the Constitution held at its ratification binds the United States as a political community, and that decades of precedent must be scraped off the original Constitution like barnacles on a ship’s hull. …

Huffington Post mines the book on Steve Jobs.

Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the president personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that Obama “was really psyched to meet with you,” Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.

Jobs also criticized America’s education system, saying it was “crippled by union work rules,” noted Isaacson. “Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.” Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.

The Economist reviews a documentary on the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. The conclusions seem to be scattered, but we like the piece because it reminds us how foolish the bien pensants really are.

THE filmmakers behind “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” confronted a formidable task: to strip away the layers of a narrative so familiar that even they themselves believed it when they first set out to make their documentary. Erected in St Louis, Missouri, in the early 1950s, at a time of postwar prosperity and optimism, the massive Pruitt-Igoe housing project soon became a notorious symbol of failed public policy and architectural hubris, its 33 towers razed a mere two decades later. Such symbolism found its most immediate expression in the iconic image of an imploding building, the first of Pruitt-Igoe’s towers to be demolished in 1972 (it was featured in the cult film Koyaanisqatsi, with Philip Glass’s score murmuring in the background). The spectacle was as powerful politically as it was visually, locating the failure of Pruitt-Igoe within the buildings themselves—in their design and in their mission.
 
The scale of the project made it conspicuous from the get-go: 33 buildings, 11-storeys each, arranged across a sprawling, 57 acres in the poor DeSoto-Carr neighbourhood on the north side of St Louis. The complex was supposed to put the modernist ideals of Le Corbusier into action; at the time, Architectural Forum ran a story praising the plan to replace “ramshackle houses jammed with people—and rats” in the city’s downtown with “vertical neighbourhoods for poor people.” The main architect was Minoru Yamasaki, who would go on to design another monument to modernism that would also be destroyed, but for very different reasons, and under very different circumstances: his World Trade Centre went up in the early 1970s, right around the time that Pruitt-Igoe was pulled down. …

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Mark Steyn notes some of the farce in Occupy Wall Street.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Ben & Jerry’s, the hippie-dippy Vermont ice-cream makers, have come out in favor of “Occupy Wall Street.” Or as their press release puts it:

“We, the Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors, compelled by our personal convictions and our Company’s mission and values, wish to express our deepest admiration to all of you who have initiated the non-violent Occupy Wall Street Movement and to those around the country who have joined in solidarity.”

Ben & Jerry’s is a wholly owned subsidiary of Unilever. What’s that? It’s an Anglo-Dutch multinational (stand well back) corporation!! They produce a big chunk of everything in your kitchen and bathroom. Twelve of their brands have annual sales of over a billion euros per product, and, as I’m sure I don’t need to point out, a euro is well north of a buck these days. Unilever’s various billion-euro brands include Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Sunsilk shampoo, and Flora margarine. They’re the biggest ice-cream manufacturer not just in Vermont but on the planet: They have a zillion factories churning out Popsicle and Breyers and brands you’ve never heard of but which are the biggest-selling cones and sundaes in Singapore, Pakistan, Belgium, and Lithuania. Unilever is about as corporately corporate as you can get.

They brought in a Unilever guy from Norway to be Ben & Jerry’s CEO, and neither Ben nor Jerry holds an executive position with the company, any more than Uncle Ben (no relation) and Aunt Jemima do with their respective corporate masters. I suppose they could have renamed the operating unit UniBen or JerryLever, but instead they decided to keep the whole tie-dye peace-pop cherry-Garcia vibe going. One might think this inherently preposterous, in the same way that one would assume even gullible music fans would guffaw at a label called “Maverick Records” that is, in fact, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group. …

Dem pollster, Douglas Schoen is aghast at the administration’s decision to throw in with the flea party. 

President Obama and the Democratic leadership are making a critical error in embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement—and it may cost them the 2012 election.

Last week, senior White House adviser David Plouffe said that “the protests you’re seeing are the same conversations people are having in living rooms and kitchens all across America. . . . People are frustrated by an economy that does not reward hard work and responsibility, where Wall Street and Main Street don’t seem to play by the same set of rules.” Nancy Pelosi and others have echoed the message.

Yet the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people—and particularly with swing voters who are largely independent and have been trending away from the president since the debate over health-care reform.

The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion. …

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor tosses out some ideas on why Obama would want to align with OWS. 

So what explains Obama’s decision to align himself with such a cretinous assemblage?  I can think of several, not mutually exclusive, alternatives:

1. Given the objective economic conditions, Obama feels desperate politically, and knows that he cannot win using a conventional campaign.  So he is throwing in with a disruptive force that could upset conventional political dynamics and calculations.  A go-for-broke, put himself at the head of the mob strategy.  These strategies can work, but they are very risky–and often end up devouring the would-be leaders–for once destablizing forces are unleashed, they are extremely difficult to control. [Update: I note that the pivotal moment in Obama's 2008 victory was the Lehman collapse and subsequent panic. He was fading before that, but the crisis propelled him to victory.   He benefited from chaos in 2008: why not create his own in 2011-2012?]

2. A realization that the ultimate result of a success of this movement would be to strengthen the government’s power–and not coincidentally strengthen the corporatism from which the Daleys etc. profit.

3. A recognition that this is a way to shakedown Wall Street for campaign contributions which have been less forthcoming than in 2008.  Remember Obama’s “my administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks” remark in 2009?   Translated: pay up or I’ll get out of the way.

2012 was already shaping up to be an ugly and angry campaign.  By going all in for a class warfare, us against them, strategy, Obama is making it all the uglier.  One interpretation is that he is choosing the Sampson option:  If I go down, I’ll bring everything down with me.

Mickey Kaus thinks maybe the president is over the top with his rhetoric.

Obama has been accused of feeling smugly superior to the conventional pols around him, especially those in Congress. He has now responded with this jobs-bill pitch:

“We’re going to give members of Congress another chance to step up to the plate and do the right thing,” Mr. Obama said as he began a three-day bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia. “Maybe they just couldn’t understand the whole thing all at once, so we’re going to break it up into bite-sized pieces so they can take a thoughtful approach to this legislation.” [Emphasis.Added.]

That should put the “condescension” charge to rest. …

Jonah Goldberg says don’t lose sight of the fact these people are leftists.

.. Meanwhile, I think it’s important not to lose sight of the political import of Occupy Wall Street. Even if this was a campground for modern day Horatio Algers—which I do not believe—the OWS movement is lending its voice to institutions and personalities who are fundamentally opposed to capitalism. One needn’t call the full roll of speakers at Zuccotti Park and its sister protests to know that I am right. But when Francis Fox Piven, the American Communist Party, Slavoj Zizek, et al are being greeted with cheers or at least open arms or when surveys of actual protesters show that a third advocate violence to advance their cause, I for one do not find much solace in the fact that they’ve done yeoman work creating a water filtration system.

Speaking of leftists who can’t give it up, Justice Stevens gets a once over from Richard Epstein.

… What is so sad about Justice Stevens’ recent extrajudicial outbursts is that they go in exactly the opposite direction, by lashing out at decisions that he does not like, without worrying much whether or how they fit in with the original constitutional scheme.

The first example in this regard is his statement that he regarded the position of the Bush team in Bush v. Gore as “frivolous.” According to Politico [4],

Stevens recalls that he bumped into fellow Justice Stephen Breyer at a Christmas party, where the two men discussed the issue.

“We agreed that the application was frivolous,” Stevens writes. “To secure a stay, a litigant must show that one is necessary to prevent a legally cognizable irreparable injury. Bush’s attorneys had failed to make any such showing.”

“Frivolous” is a fighting word. But just what was Justice Stevens thinking? Clearly the statement is a cheap shot at those who took the opposite side in Bush v. Gore. As a matter of decorum, it seems wrong to invoke Justice Breyer’s name while he is still sitting on the Court, and wrong as well to take potshots at those like Justices Scalia and Thomas, who are also on the Supreme Court, or Chief Justice Rehnquist, who is dead. Put otherwise, all sitting justices are subject to all sorts of institutional constraints that make it inappropriate for them to respond to Justice Stevens. Knowing that, it seems wise for him to leave the harsh words to others.

On substantive matters, the picture is no better. The last thing that should be said about the decision in Bush v. Gore is that there is “no legally cognizable irreparable injury” when the presidency of the United States is at stake. To be sure, one could take the position that the recount should be allowed to go forward before its legality is decided. But what would have happened if a highly disputed recount had gone forward only for a divided court to decide that the recount should never have been allowed at all? Indeed, if Justice Stevens’ Christmas party observation was that obvious, it is passing strange that no one bothered to raise it in Bush v. Gore to begin with.

Worse still is the dismissive attitude that Justice Stevens takes toward those who disagree with him. I quite agree that the equal protection argument adopted by the five-member majority in Bush v. Gore was, to say the least, something of a stretch. But I have long believed that the three-justice opinion signed by Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Justices Scalia and Thomas, carried a lot of weight. The Florida Supreme Court had made a complete mess of the recount provisions of contested elections in a political effort to remove the control of that decision from Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, in whom the power had been vested under state law.

To my mind, the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court applied bore no relationship to the one that the Florida legislature had enacted to govern election disputes. Under those circumstances, it was more than credible to argue the opposite position that the Florida recount was unconstitutional because it did not meet the requirement of Article I, Section 1 that “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature may direct, a Number of Electors” who then cast votes for president. The sad point here is that Justice Stevens simply bypasses the arguments that cut against his position. …

Andrew Malcolm has some good news and some bad news. Good news is he has late-night humor wrap up. Bad news is they found Obama’s teleprompter.

First, the bad news: They recovered President Obama’s teleprompter.

So, anybody going to his speeches on the current Darth Vader armored bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia is still going to get the full 22-minute monty about how he’s there to listen.

The Real Good Talker’s top speech aide was in a truck stolen from a Richmond hotel parking lot early Monday morning and recovered in another hotel parking lot about 12 hours later. …

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How ignorant is Rep Barbara Lee? This open letter from Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek will give you an idea.

… Fred Barnes reports in the Weekly Standard that you refuse to use computerized checkout lanes at supermarkets (“Boneheaded Economics,” Oct. 24).  As you – who are described on your website as “progressive” – explain, “I refuse to do that.  I know that’s a job or two or three that’s gone.”

Overlooking the fact that you overlook the lower prices on groceries made possible by this labor-saving technology, I’ve some questions for you:

Do you also avoid using computerized (“automatic”) elevators, riding only in those few that still use manual elevator operators?

Do you steer clear of newer automobiles equipped with technologies that enable them to go for 100,000 miles before needing a tune-up?  I’m sure I can find for you, say, a 1972 Chevy Vega that will oblige you to employ countless mechanics.

Do you shun tubeless steel-belted radial tires on your car – you know, the kind that go flat far less often than do old-fashioned tires?  No telling how many tire-repairing jobs have been destroyed by modern technology-infused tires.

Do you and your family refuse flu shots in order to increase your chances of requiring the services of nurses and M.D.s – and, if the economy gets lucky and you and yours get seriously ill, also of hospital orderlies and administrators?  Someone as aware as you are of the full ramifications of your consumption choices surely takes account of the ill effects that flu shots have on the jobs of health-care providers.

You must, indeed, be distressed as you observe the appalling amount of labor-saving technologies in use throughout our economy.  It is, alas, a disturbing trend that has been around for quite some time – since, really, the invention of the spear which destroyed the jobs of some hunters. …

Then again, maybe Barbara Lee takes the lead from her president. This post from The Money Illusion contains an item from the Suskind book about the administration. If you remember, Obama had the same problem with ATM machines.

A couple days ago I suggested that Obama might not be particularly well-informed about economics:

“It seems increasingly clear that Obama doesn’t have a good understanding of economics.  He approaches issues like a very bright non-economist using his common sense.”

It now appears that it’s even worse than I thought.  I found this quotation from Ron Suskind over at DeLong’s blog. 

‘ Both, in fact, were concerned by something the President had said in a morning briefing: that he thought the high unemployment was due to productivity gains in the economy.  Summers and Romer were startled.

“What was driving unemployment was clearly deficient aggregate demand,” Romer said.  “We wondered where this could be coming from.  We both tried to convince him otherwise.  He wouldn’t budge.” ‘

Mort Zuckerman was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

‘It’s as if he doesn’t like people,” says real-estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman of the president of the United States. Barack Obama doesn’t seem to care for individuals, elaborates Mr. Zuckerman, though the president enjoys addressing millions of them on television.

The Boston Properties CEO is trying to understand why Mr. Obama has made little effort to build relationships on Capitol Hill or negotiate a bipartisan economic plan. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Zuckerman wrote in these pages two months ago that the entire business community was “pleading for some kind of adult supervision” in Washington and “desperate for strong leadership.” Writing soon after the historic downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt by Standard & Poor’s, he wrote, “I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country.”

His words struck a chord. When I visit Mr. Zuckerman this week in his midtown Manhattan office, he reports that three people approached him at dinner the previous evening to discuss his August op-ed. Among business executives who supported Barack Obama in 2008, he says, “there is enormously widespread anxiety over the political leadership of the country.” Mr. Zuckerman reports that among Democrats, “The sense is that the policies of this government have failed. . . . What they say about [Mr. Obama] when he’s not in the room, so to speak, is astonishing.” …

… Unprompted, he spends much of our discussion reminiscing about the Reagan presidency. Mr. Zuckerman has for years owned U.S. News and World Report, and in 1986 its Moscow correspondent Nicholas Daniloff was seized without warning by the KGB.

Mr. Zuckerman immediately flew to Russia but returned home when Soviet officials refused to release their new prisoner. “I worked in the White House for the next four weeks virtually every day and through that I met Reagan,” says Mr. Zuckerman. Reagan secured Mr. Daniloff’s release in a swap that included a Soviet spy held in the U.S.

“Reagan surprised me,” says Mr. Zuckerman. “He got the point of every argument. . . . He was very decisive. And everybody loved working for him. They followed his lead because they really respected his decisiveness and his instincts.”

‘I was not a Republican and I was not an admirer of his before I knew him,” continues Mr. Zuckerman. “And you know, Harry Truman had a wonderful definition for the presidency. He said the president has to be someone who can persuade the American people to do what they don’t want to do and to like it. And that’s what you have to do. Somebody like Reagan had that authority. He was liked so much and he had a kind of moral authority. That’s what this president has lost.”

“Democracy does not work without the right leadership,” he says later, “and you can’t play politics.” The smile inspired by Reagan memories is gone now and Mr. Zuckerman is pounding his circular conference table. “The country has got to come to the conclusion at some point that what you’re doing is not just because of an ideology or politics but for the interests of the country.”

Nile Gardiner notes the 1,000 days of this administration.

If recent polls are any indication, it is doubtful that President Obama will enjoy another 1,000 days in the White House. And looking at his track record over the course of his first 33 months in office, it is not hard to see why. It is hard to think of a presidency in modern times that has done more to damage the United States both at home and abroad than the current one, with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter’s. Like his Democratic predecessor in the 1970’s, Barack Obama has left the world’s dominant superpower on its knees, with faith in US leadership now being questioned across the globe.

Since taking office in January 2009, President Obama has ushered in a period of relentless economic decline for the United States. His administration has added $4.2 trillion to the national debt (now standing at $14.9 trillion), lost 2.2 million jobs, introduced a vastly expensive health-care albatross, and spent nearly $800 billion on a failed stimulus package. At the same time, house prices across the country have tumbled at an unprecedented rate, consumer confidence has plummeted, and millions more Americans are now dependent upon food stamps. International confidence in the US economy has fallen to its lowest levels in decades, with credit agency Standard and Poor’s downgrading of America’s AAA credit rating for the first time in 70 years in August this year. …

More from the Washington Times. 

One day soon, someone will write a book titled “The Stumbling, Bumbling, One-Term Presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.” It will be a best-seller – off the nonfiction shelf, of course.

Every presidency is, to be sure, fraught with missteps, mistakes and even fundamental misunderstandings of the task at hand. But President Obama has taken those pitfalls to new heights, and in so doing has exposed what can be called only “Amateur Hour in the White House.”

Just in the past month or so, the president and his jejune minions have delivered every bit of evidence needed to support the theory that no one in the big house knows what they’re doing. …

How about someone from the left. Like a card carrying liberal like Eleanor Clift.

… Washington’s scandal du jour has been Solyndra. The California solar company received a rushed half-billion-dollar clean-energy stimulus loan from the Obama administration, only to go bankrupt and potentially leave taxpayers on the hook—despite warnings from career officials that both Solyndra and the larger solar industry were facing financial pressures.

But it is far from the only blemish on the administration’s much-touted green agenda. In addition to weatherization problems, an internal Labor Department report disclosed this month that a multibillion-dollar program to retrain workers for green-energy jobs met only 10 percent of its goal of creating 80,000 jobs. A federal renewable-energy lab in Colorado that got nearly $300 million from another green-energy program began laying off 10 percent of its workforce last month.

Overall, as the $787 billion economic stimulus—the primary engine for the green-energy agenda—came to an end Sept. 30, it is clear that the program created far fewer jobs than promised. So-called green-collar jobs are notoriously hard to tally, but numerous estimates by gleeful Republicans put the taxpayer cost of each green-energy job created by the stimulus at more than $1 million. …

More from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Can we finally put to rest the idea that government creates jobs? Can everyone finally agree that “green jobs” will never be part of an economic recovery — in Nevada or anywhere else?

There is simply no spinning or distorting the failure of one of President Obama’s biggest initiatives and campaign promises. “Hope” and “Change” hinged on creating 5 million green jobs in 10 years. As a down payment, the stimulus abomination set aside billions of dollars, including a $500 million grant to train 125,000 people for the noble work of the future.

As of this summer, of the nearly 53,000 people who had completed the training at a cost of $163 million, barely 8,000 had found work. Only 1,000 had held a job for more than six months, according to a report released this month by the Labor Department’s inspector general.

Is America just not ready for such new, high-tech positions heralding an age of renewable energy? Could that explain why so many people training for the jobs of the future can’t find work today?

Well, no. According to the inspector general’s report, some of the positions that fall under the administration’s definition of “green jobs” include: forklift operator, sheet metal worker, welder, plumber, electrician, car mechanic and garbage handler.

Did you really think 5 million people in this country would hold sustainable jobs manufacturing, assembling and maintaining solar panels and wind turbines? If you do anything that could conceivably benefit the environment — install a no-flush urinal or an energy-efficient appliance, drive a hybrid bus, collect used cooking oils, lobby against fossil fuels — you are a green-collar worker, as far as Washington is concerned. …

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Mark Steyn ponders what decline will look like.

… Whenever the economy goes south, experts talk of the housing “bubble,” the tech “bubble,” the credit “bubble.” But the real bubble is the 1950 “American moment,” and our failure to understand that moments are not permanent. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the only industrial power with its factories intact and its cities not reduced to rubble, and assumed that that unprecedented pre-eminence would last forever: We would always be so far ahead and so flush with cash that we could do anything and spend anything, and we would still be No. 1. That was the thinking of Detroit’s automakers when they figured they could afford to buy off the unions. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases. And yes, Detroit is an outlier, but look at the assumptions its rulers made, and then wonder whether it will seem quite such an outlier in the future.

Take, for example, the complaints of the young Americans currently “occupying” Wall Street. Many protesters have told sympathetic reporters that “it’s our Arab Spring.” Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the “Occupy” demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months’ time. They’re worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U.

One sympathizes. When college tuition is $50,000 a year, you can’t “work your way through college” – because, after all, an 18-year-old who can earn 50-grand a year wouldn’t need to go to college, would he? Nevertheless, his situation is not the same as some guy halfway up the Nile living on $2 a day: One is a crisis of the economy, the other is a crisis of decadence. And, generally, the former are far easier to solve. …

More of this from Robert Samuelson.

A specter haunts America: downward mobility. Every generation, we believe, should live better than its predecessor. By and large, Americans still embrace that promise. A Pew survey earlier this year found that 48 percent of respondents felt that their children’s living standards would exceed their own. Although that’s down from 61 percent in 2002, it’s on a par with the mid-1990s. But these expectations could be dashed. For young Americans, the future could be dimmer.

Along with jobs, the 2012 presidential election could be fought over this issue. “Can the Middle Class Be Saved?” worried a recent cover story in the Atlantic. Pessimism rises with schooling. In the Pew poll, 54 percent of respondents with a high-school diploma or less felt their children would do better; only 35 percent of graduate school alums agreed. “A kind of depression has set in,” writes Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. “We’ve lost our mojo, our groove.”

It can be argued that all this glumness repeats a historical error: projecting the present onto the future. Just because the economy is rotten today doesn’t mean that it will always be. After World War II, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Fogel has recalled, there was widespread “alarm about massive unemployment.” Eleven million veterans and 9 million defense industry workers had to be re-employed. People feared a new Depression. It didn’t happen, because pent-up demand for homes, cars and appliances fueled a hiring boom.

Unfortunately, this caveat is only half relevant now. …

Last week David Harsanyi had a go at a manifesto for the Occupy Wall Street folks. This week Barton Hinkle from the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a turn. We need this after the first two items.

We are the union members, students, teachers, veterans and activists who make up the 99 percent of America, if you don’t count everybody who is at work right now. We are the unemployed and the art majors and the interns for Rainforest Action Now!

Also we are the firefighters and the police officers and the paramedics, except none of them could be here on account of their fascist shift supervisors, but we know they are with us in spirit. (First responders, you guys rock!) We are the lost, the slightly disoriented, and the people who are pretty sure they know where they are if you’d just be quiet for one second and let us think, okay? Jeez.

Where were we? Oh yeah. We are the makers of homeopathic medicines. We are also the Druids. There’s a couple of Zoroastrians around here somewhere, too (or at least that is what some of us think the tattoo on the one dude’s neck means).

Also, we are that long-haired welder guy who makes bird sculptures out of rebar and old gardening equipment. We are Slightly Creepy Hippie Lady in a Van Who Sells Healing Crystals. We are the young woman with the piercings and the pink hair who just came from the D.C. Slutwalk. We are the guys in goatees and motorcycle boots who can’t ride a motorcycle, who are hoping to score with Pink-Hair Girl.

We are the 99 percent. And we are Here to Stay.

Megan McArdle does a wonderful job of tracking the green jobs money. You will be amazed where the cash went. She made a very good info-graphic that we are unable to fit into our format so you must follow the link to see more than the little bit in the Word or PDF versions.

Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison just resigned, as the controversy stubbornly refuses to go away.  Seems worth revisiting the loans once again, since I’ve spent a little time looking more deeply at the program over the past few days.

Supporters of these programs claim that they’re a necessary part of winning the green future because these are investments that are too risky, or too big, for private capital to take on.  

Of course, if the government is going to be a VC, supporters say, they have to expect a high failure rate. There’s a lot of talk about the manufacturing “Valley of Death“, where startup manufacturing firms may have difficulty getting capital to commercialize their prototypes.  According to proponents of this theory, there’s plenty of money for early stage ventures, and plenty of bank loans for established firms, but no money for mass commercialization of new manufacturing ideas.  (Hence the “valley”).  This valley, they say, is especially wide for energy firms, because the capital costs for starting up are so high.

I’ve been somewhat skeptical of those claims–why are people pouring money into manufacturing startups if they’re inevitably doomed to die at the commercialization stage?  But say it’s true.  I thought it was worth looking at who got the money from these programs, and for what.  How well is the government doing in its role of VC/valley of death sherpa?

So I went to the DOE’s website and manually copied the data on the loan programs.  I didn’t scrutinize all of the projects–I’ve already spent more time on this than is probably justified.  But I looked at the biggest ones.  I put all the number into pretty graphs.  And then I thought I’d share those graphs with you, because hell, I have them.  

What I’m trying to say is, I just made my first infographic. …

Michael Barone celebrates the end of high speed rail.

Dead. Kaput. Through. Finished. Washed up. Gone-zo.

That, I think, is a fair description of the Obama administration’s attempt to build high-speed rail lines across America.

It hasn’t failed because of a lack of willingness to pony up money. The Obama Democrats’ February 2009 stimulus package included $8 billion for high-speed rail projects. The Democratic Congress appropriated another $2.5 billion.

But Congress is turning off the spigot. The Republican-controlled House has appropriated zero dollars for high-speed rail. The Democratic-majority Senate Appropriations Committee has appropriated $100 million in their budget recommendation.

That’s effectively “a vote of ‘no confidence’ to President Obama’s infrastructure initiative,” concludes transportation analyst Ken Orski, “a bipartisan signal that Congress has no appetite for pouring more money into a venture that many lawmakers have come to view as a poster child for wasteful spending.” …