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Streetwise Professor on the administration’s Friday afternoon dump of CLASS (Community Living Assistance Services and Supports)

One element of Obamacare, the CLASS program (a long term care program) has flatlined.  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, officially acknowledged what had been known since the get go: the program was not economically feasible.  So she pulled the plug.

CLASS was one of the myriad pieces of legislative-financial legerdemain used to make believe that Obamacare would actually reduce future deficits.

The budgetary impacts of Obamacare were made up out of the whole cloth: CLASS was just the most egregious example of that.  To create the fiction that Obamacare would save money, Congress and the administration resorted to budgetary and accounting tricks that were so outrageous that even the Greeks would have blanched at the thought of using them when presenting their fiscal numbers in to qualify for the Eurozone.

Yes.  That bad.

Obamacare is not only a policy disaster, it is a fiscal time bomb.  One would hope that the premature detonation of CLASS will put Congress and the country on warning, and result in the defusing of the rest of the whole dangerous mess.  That, unfortunately, will have to wait until January 2013, at the earliest.

Jennifer Rubin on the demise of CLASS.

… To say that this is an embarrassment for the gang in the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership, who we already knew could not shoot straight, would be a gross understatement. The failure of CLASS, predicted by conservatives, sprang from the Democrats’ insistence to pass some “historic” health-care bill, any such bill, and deal with the consequences later. Well, later is now. You can be sure that this — along with the failed stimulus bill, the high unemployment rate and the massive debt — will be frequent features in Republicans’ 2012 ads.

Charles Krauthammer sums up the Obama strategy.

What do you do if you can’t run on your record — on 9 percent unemployment, stagnant growth and ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see? How to run when you are asked whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago and you are compelled to answer no?

Play the outsider. Declare yourself the underdog. Denounce Washington as if the electorate hasn’t noticed that you’ve been in charge of it for nearly three years.

But above all: Find villains.

President Obama first tried finding excuses, blaming America’s dismal condition on Japanese supply-chain interruptions, the Arab Spring, European debt and various acts of God.

Didn’t work. Sounds plaintive, defensive. Lacks fight, which is what Obama’s base lusts for above all.

Hence Obama’s new strategy: Don’t whine, blame. Attack. Indict. Accuse. Who? The rich — and their Republican protectors — for wrecking America.

In Obama’s telling, it’s the refusal of the rich to “pay their fair share” that jeopardizes Medicare. If millionaires don’t pony up, schools will crumble. Oil-drilling tax breaks are costing teachers their jobs. Corporate loopholes will gut medical research.  …

This piece by Steve Hayward is a little long, but he needs time to explain why it is today’s liberals heart Ronald Reagan.

Of all the unlikely developments in American politics over the last two decades, the most astonishing is this: liberals suddenly love Ronald Reagan. They have taken to celebrating certain virtues they claim Reagan possessed—virtues they believe are absent from the conservative body politic today—while looking back with nostalgia at the supposed civility of the political struggles of the 1980s.

“There’s something there I miss today,” mused the former Democratic staffer and longtime talk-show host Chris Matthews in January about the relationship between Reagan and House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, the most powerful Democrat in Washington during Reagan’s first term. Matthews dreamily evoked a time when Reagan and O’Neill had drinks together, swapped Irish stories, slapped backs, and, they say, cut deals with a minimum of personal rancor—as opposed to the ugly relations between the two parties today.

Even more notable is the fact that Reagan has become a model for presidential governance for . . . Barack Obama. Time, having proclaimed Obama to be the second coming of FDR in January 2009, abandoned that image in favor of declaring an Obama “bromance” with Reagan in January 2011. The White House’s press office revealed that Obama had read Lou Cannon’s biography of Reagan over the 2010 Christmas holidays, a choice that might once have seemed as incongruous as John F. Kennedy reading up on Calvin Coolidge. Obama even wrote an homage to Reagan for USA Today in February at the time of Reagan’s centennial birthday. “Reagan recognized the American people’s hunger for accountability and change,” the president said, thereby conferring on Reagan two of his most cherished political slogans.

All in all, say Time’s Michael Duffy and Michael Scherer, “there is no mistaking Obama’s increasing reliance on his predecessor’s career as a helpful template for his own.” After all, Reagan governed during a punishing recession with horrific unemployment, both of which led to a bad midterm election for his party and approval ratings in the 30s—only to win a 49-state landslide reelection. It is only natural for Obama and his political team to look at Reagan’s example to glean lessons about how they might achieve a similar result in 2012. …

Charlie Gasparino says the “flea party” is picketing the wrong people.

Here’s an important irony lost on those zany and sometimes violent Wall Street protesters: On the day that they extended their near riots from the financial district to the swanky uptown neighborhoods where many of the Wall Street millionaires live, we got proof positive that the ranks of the wealthiest Wall Streeters are shrinking.

Which is rotten news for the massive New York City welfare state that the protesters say they want to protect.

The proof comes from a new report by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli that confirms much that’s been said and reported on these pages: The number of Wall Street fat cats is shrinking fairly dramatically, and will continue to shrink in the years ahead — meaning even less money coming from one of New York’s most important sources of tax revenue.

It also confirms something else reported recently on these pages: Rather than heading uptown to the homes of people like JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, the protesters should be marching south — way south — to protest the Washington lawmakers who gave us the jobs-killing Dodd-Frank financial reform. …

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Spengler gives a Mid-East exam.

Here’s your final exam question in Middle Eastern studies:

A mass of Coptic Christians marches through Cairo to protest the military government’s failure to protect them from Muslim radicals. They are attacked by stone-throwing, club-wielding rowdies. Armed forces security personnel intervene, and the Copts fight it out with the soldiers, with two dozen dead and scores injured on both sides. Who is to blame?

The full credit answer is: Benjamin Netanyahu, for building apartments in Jerusalem. If that’s not what you wrote, don’t blame me if you can’t get a job at the New York Times.

Rarely in the course of human events have so few been blamed by so much for so many. There are precedents, for example, when Adolf Hitler claimed that a Jewish “stab in the back” lost World War I for Germany. The notion that the problems of three hundred million Arabs revolve around the governance of a few million Palestinians has the same order of credibility. …

Nile Gardiner says the recently uncovered Iran DC terror bombing plot hangs a BS label on Obama’s approach to the Mullahs.

The foiled plot by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States is a slap in the face for the Obama administration, after its efforts to extend the hand of friendship to the brutal regime in Tehran. As Con Coughlin noted earlier, this should be a wake-up call for the White House. As it has done with Russia, the Obama presidency has attempted to “reset” relations with Iran. But with both Moscow and Tehran, Washington has failed. Both hostile powers have grown emboldened and aggressive in the face of American weakness, and Iran’s brazen attempt to kill a foreign diplomat in the capital city of the United States showcases the folly of the White House’s softly-softly approach towards the ruling mullahs.

While Washington dithers, Iran is marching closer and closer to developing a nuclear weapon, which according to some estimates is just six months away. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to threaten Israel with genocide, while the Obama administration has significantly cooled relations with Jerusalem – hardly the right signal to send to a close friend and ally at a time of mounting tensions in the Middle East. …

Friday afternoon is when the administration gives us the news they hope will be ignored. National Review editors are on the job though.

In a Friday bad-news dump that was a whopper even by its own standards, the Obama administration added to the announcement of a near-record annual deficit and an escalation of undeclared war in Uganda the news that the CLASS Act, an ill-conceived adjunct of the Affordable Care Act, is no more. The upshot is this: Obamacare just got a whole lot more expensive than advertised, and there is reason to believe that its Democratic architects have long known this would happen.

The Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act was the brainchild of the late senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, and it was supposed to be a kind of Social Security that provided long-term care for the elderly. It figured heavily into the Democrats’ dubious accounting of the cost of the Affordable Care Act, and at the time of passage was expected to account for $70 billion out of a total $143 billion in “deficit reduction” claimed in the bill.

But that number was a lie twice over. …

Andrew Malcolm lists the percentage of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track.

… However, since the sixth month of his White House lease Obama’s right track number has been on the southbound track.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, 91% of Republicans believe the country is on the wrong track.

Ominously, though, fully 80% of  independents, so crucial to any president’s election, are now convinced the country is on the wrong track.

And a substantial majority of Democrats, those expected to be the most loyal to the Chicagoan, are also now thinking wrong track by 59%.

Time for the Real Good Talker to give some more speeches.

Karlyn Bowman and Andrew Rugg from AEI say that’s not the only problem for the president.

President Obama is in deep political trouble. While that’s hardly news—the president’s approval rating sits at 40 percent in the latest Gallup poll—the picture is much bleaker than that figure would suggest. Comparing President Obama to other incumbent presidents at this point in the campaign on a variety of indicators shows how grim the picture is for the 44th president.

Just 11 percent of respondents say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the country in Gallup’s most recent poll. Only Jimmy Carter had numbers like this: In November 1979, 19 percent reported they were satisfied with the way things are going in the country. …

Joel Kotkin explains the changes that have come to Silicon Valley. Sitting at the commanding heights doesn’t create many jobs.

Even before Steve Jobs crashed the scene in late 1970s, California’s technology industry had already outpaced the entire world, creating the greatest collection of information companies anywhere. It was in this fertile suburban soil that Apple — and so many other innovative companies — took root.

Now this soil is showing signs of exhaustion, with Jobs’ death symbolizing the end of the state’s high-tech heroic age.

“Steve’s passing really makes you think how much the Valley has changed,” says Leslie Parks, former head of economic development for the city of San Jose, Silicon Valley’s largest city. “The Apple II was produced here and depended on what was unique here. In those days, we were the technology food chain from conception to product. Now we only dominate the top of the chain.”

Silicon Valley’s job creation numbers are dismal. In 1999 the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area had over 1 million jobs; by 2010 that number shrank by nearly 150,000. Although since 2007 and early 2010 the number of information jobs has increased substantially — up roughly 5000 to a total of 46,000 — the industrial sector, which still employs almost four times as many people as IT, lost around 12,000. Overall the region’s unemployment stands at 10%, well above the national average of 9.1% …

Debra Saunders says there’s no fool like a “green jobs” fool. 

Before the Senate failed to pass his American Jobs Act Tuesday, President Obama made a last-ditch speech to talk up his troubled bill. But not once did Obama mention “green jobs” – his erstwhile jobs of the future.

Smart move. Obama’s $787 billion 2009 stimulus package included $500 million for green-jobs training programs that were supposed to create new middle-class jobs for thousands of Americans. Last month, however, the Department of Labor’s inspector general conducted an audit that found, as of June 30 with one-third of the funds spent and more than 50,000 participants, that only 10 percent of trainees were placed in jobs. And only 1,336 participants (or 2 percent) had held jobs for six months or longer.

The audit reported that grant recipients “expressed concerns that green jobs had not materialized and job placements into subsidized employment had been much less than expected.”  …

At dinner a few days ago, Pickerhead expressed the thought it is impossible for our society to move forward until we can reconcile the competing narratives about the causes of the credsis. Here’s another attempt as a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed addresses the Occupiers. You know, the left’s version of the tea party – what Ann Coulter calls the “flea party.” 

There is no mystery where the Occupy Wall Street movement came from: It is an offspring of the same false narrative about the causes of the financial crisis that exculpated the government and brought us the Dodd-Frank Act. According to this story, the financial crisis and ensuing deep recession was caused by a reckless private sector driven by greed and insufficiently regulated. It is no wonder that people who hear this tale repeated endlessly in the media turn on Wall Street to express their frustration with the current conditions in the economy.

Their anger should be directed at those who developed and supported the federal government’s housing policies that were responsible for the financial crisis.

Beginning in 1992, the government required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct a substantial portion of their mortgage financing to borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities. The original legislative quota was 30%. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development was given authority to adjust it, and through the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations HUD raised the quota to 50% by 2000 and 55% by 2007. …

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David Goldman has long predicted Egypt would descend into chaos.

Sunday’s massacre of protesting Copts is heartbreaking; from the initial reports, several thousand Christians marched to protest the military government’s blind eye towards Muslim violence “when they were attacked by thugs carrying swords and clubs,” according to one Copt. The Egyptian government says that the Christian protesters began firing live ammunition at soldiers. That stretches credibility. …

… No-one appears in charge. Central bank foreign exchange reserves are down to just $19 billion, or four months’ imports, the Financial Times reported last week. “After negotiating a loan from the International Monetary Fund, the military council decided to scrap it, partly on fears of popular criticism – the IMF has a negative reputation in Egypt because of its association with harsh structural adjustment programmes. In addition, only $500m of some $7bn of promised aid from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have arrived so far.”

Egypt literally will run out of food. It imports half its caloric consumption, mainly wheat (although Egyptians eat less wheat than Iranians, Moroccans, Canadians, Turks and Russians). Egypt spends $5.5 billion a year on food subsidies. Its social solidarity minister wants to change the system (which subsidizes some people who can afford to pay more than the penny a loaf the government charges), but seems deeply confused. “‘We need to change consumer habits so that we are not consuming so much bread. In Mexico, for example, they rely more on potatoes. Why can’t we start shifting toward that?’said Saad Nassar, adviser to the agriculture minister.” Mr. Nassar seems unaware that Mexicans eat more corn than wheat or potatoes. This discussion would be comical if not for the fact that Egypt is about to run out of money to pay for any sort of food. …

Andrew McCarthy and Mark Steyn post on Egypt in The Corner. Here’s Mark.

Andy, good luck rousing the western media to the plight of Egypt’s Christians. The boobs proclaimed Tahrir Square an “Arab Spring” and then moved on. I chanced to be on Fox News with Megyn Kelly half-an-hour after Mubarak threw in the towel, and, while Anderson Cooper was cooing orgasmically over on CNN, offered the cheerless thought that this was the dawn of the post-western Middle East, and the beginning of something potentially very dark. I’ll stand by that. As I wrote in February:

“The Kingdom of Egypt in the period between 1922 and 1952 was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it got closer to a functioning, pluralist society than anything in the 60 years since. For example, in 1923, Egypt’s first full year as a sovereign state, the country’s Minister of Finance was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a Member of Parliament and a Jew.”

Try to imagine that now: a Jew serving as an Arab Muslim nation’s Finance Minister – or even getting elected as an obscure backbench MP. Sounds like something from a Give-peace-a-chance multifaith fantasy. But it actually happened – and then it stopped happening, and then it became inconceivable for it to happen ever again under any plausible scenario.

Shortly thereafter, Mr Cattaui’s great-grandson wrote to me from France, where he now lives. Because it’s not just that in Egypt a Jew can’t be Finance Minister but that a Jew can’t be. Because Egypt spent the second half of the 20th century getting worse, and is spending the new century getting worser. We now accept a Jew-free Egypt as a normal feature of life. No doubt we shall soon do the same with a Copt-free Egypt. But we could at least stop insulting those on the receiving end of the “Arab Spring” by pretending that it’s any kind of flowering of freedom.

Marc Thiessen details the mistakes of the “hapless” Holder.

President Obama says that he has “complete confidence” in Attorney General Eric Holder. That’s good news for Republicans. Pick almost any unnecessary, losing battle in Obama’s first term, and his hapless attorney general is at the center of it.

If not for the fact that so many of Holder’s decisions harm national security, he would be a political dream come true for the GOP – delivering up reliably disastrous controversies for the president every few months.

The latest controversy over whether Holder misled a House committee on “Operation Fast and Furious” — the botched federal gun sting that allowed hundreds of weapons to flow to Mexican drug cartels and resulted in the death of an ATF agent — is only the most recent of these debacles.

Holder’s bad advice began almost immediately after Obama took office, when he and White House counsel Greg Craig convinced the president to announce the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010 — without even examining the feasibility of doing so. Not only did the president suffer the indignity of missing this deadline, public opinion turned against the decision so sharply that Democrats abandoned the president and joined Republicans in voting 90-to-6 in the Senate to block funds for the facility’s closure. Almost three years later, Guantanamo remains open and the administration has given up hope of closing it.

The next unneeded firestorm came with Holder’s decision to release classified Justice Department memos on the CIA terrorist interrogation program and reopen criminal investigations into the conduct of CIA interrogators. Holder overrode the objections of five CIA directors, including Leon Panetta. According to The Post, “Before his decision to reopen the cases, Holder did not read detailed memos that [career] prosecutors drafted and placed in files to explain their decision to decline prosecutions.” If he had bothered to do so, he could have predicted the eventual outcome: The special prosecutor he appointed came to the same conclusion as the career prosecutors under the Bush administration and found no criminal wrongdoing by the CIA officials involved in the agency’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. After two years of wasted resources and needless controversy, Holder came up empty. …

Continuing with the Holder theme, Roger Simon reviews the book written by a career lawyer in the Justice Dept. who quit in disgust.

J. Christian Adams is an American hero and his new book INJUSTICE: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department is an indispensable work for our time.

But be warned that I — as reviewers often are, even if they don’t say so — am biased, quite obviously so. From page 155 of Adams’ book: “The following week, I received an unexpected phone call from Roger Simon asking me to become a contributor to his media site Pajamas Media, one of the leading conservative news websites. I accepted his offer, and soon began writing about issues such as civil rights and the ongoing activities of the Obama DOJ.”

I make no claim of editorial brilliance for drafting Christian then. An attorney for the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice, he had just resigned after the testimony of Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez in the now infamous New Black Panther case. He wanted to blow the whistle on what he came to call the racialist (inordinately tilted in favor of minorities, largely African-American) policies and actions of the DOJ. And I was the perfect audience — having been a voter registration worker myself during the Civil Rights Movement (South Carolina 1966). I was appalled by what he told me.

So I do take inordinate pride in the subsequent writings of Christian Adams on PJMedia. They have had a significant, and growing, impact on our country and justice system. They are arguably the most socially useful articles our company has published.

That out of the way, let me turn to why I believe Injustice may be the most important American publication this year. …

Thomas Sowell also reviews Adams’ book.

… Attorney General Eric Holder became a key figure epitomizing the view that government’s role in racial matters was not to be an impartial dispenser of equal justice for all, but to be a racial partisan and an organ of racial payback. He has been too politically savvy to say that in so many words, but his actions have spoken far louder than any words.

The case that first gave the general public a glimpse of Attorney General Holder’s views and values was one in which young black thugs outside a voting site in Philadelphia were televised intimidating white voters. When this episode was broadcast, it produced public outrage.

Although the Department of Justice’s prosecution of these thugs began in the last days of the Bush administration, and the defendants had offered no legal defense, the case was dropped by the Justice Department after Eric Holder took over. One of the lawyers who were prosecuting that case resigned in protest.

That lawyer — J. Christian Adams — has now written a book, titled “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” It is a thought-provoking book and a shocking book in what it reveals about the inner workings of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division.

Bad as the Justice Department’s decision was to drop that particular case, which it had already won in court, this book makes painfully clear that this was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. …

Peter Wehner writes on the “divisive” president.

A Washington Post story from earlier this week reports, “There is a noticeably more aggressive, confrontational President Obama roaming the country these days, selling his jobs plan and attacking Republicans for standing in the way of progress by standing up only for the rich.” That report, if anything, understates things a bit. Obama has essentially given up on his governing responsibilities (at which he has shown himself to be terribly inept) in lieu of a fierce and near constant attack on his political opponents. I have my doubts as to whether that strategy will work. But the point I want to make is a different one, which is that Obama has become the most intentionally divisive president we’ve seen in quite some time.

It’s not unusual, of course, for the policies of presidents to divide the nation. And politicians running for re-election often highlight differences. But Obama now belongs in a separate category. Each day, it seems, he and/or his supporters are seeking to divide us. The rhetoric employed by the president and his allies is meant to fan the flames of resentment, to turn Americans against one another, and to stoke up feelings of envy, grievances, and rage.

This is not healthy for our country or good for our political culture. And while we all contribute to what constitutes public discourse, there is one officeholder, the president, who bears the greatest responsibility for creating a sense of common purpose and for reminding us that we are, in the words of the Pledge of Allegiance, “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Yet the president is trying, with almost every speech, to pry us apart. It’s a strategy he clearly believes is necessary for him to win re-election. But that doesn’t make what he’s doing any less shameful or any less hypocritical. …

And Steve Hayward posts in Powerline on the ignorant president. Seems he wanted to go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to apologize. The Japanese saved him from that mistake. If you read Pickings from July 14th, you’ll remember Pickerhead retailed the thought that Truman saved many Japanese lives with his decisions to drop the bombs.

I recall seeing some online grandee—I thought it was Rich Karlgaard of Forbes, but I can’t find it—explain that in the fullness of time Wikileaks would turn around and bite liberals in the rear end, and sure enough there’s been a steady stream of Wikileaks that confirm what we already know about Obama.  But still.

Over the last couple of weeks several Japanese newspapers have been all over a new Wikileak that so far has not made much of an impression anywhere in American media.  (I know: This is a surprise?)  It seems that Obama wanted to include stops at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of his 2009 World Apology Tour, so that he could apologize for Harry Truman dropping the Big One to end World War II.

Telegraph, UK with a story about a photo from our difficult past.

On her first morning of school, September 4 1957, Elizabeth Eckford’s primary concern was looking nice. Her mother had done her hair the night before; an elaborate two-hour ritual, with a hot iron and a hotter stove, of straightening and curling. Then there were her clothes. People in black Little Rock knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore they made themselves, and not from the basic patterns of McCall’s but from the more complicated ones in Vogue. It was a practice borne of tradition, pride, and necessity: homemade was cheaper, and it spared black children the humiliation of having to ask to try things on in the segregated department stores downtown.

In the fall of 1957, Elizabeth was among the nine black students who had enlisted, then been selected, to enter Little Rock Central High School.

Central was the first high school in a major southern city set to be desegregated since the United States Supreme Court had ruled three years earlier in Brown vs Board of Education that separate and ostensibly equal education was unconstitutional. Inspired both by Thurgood Marshall, who had argued the case of plaintiff Oliver L Brown, and Clarence Darrow, Elizabeth wanted to become a lawyer, and she thought Central would help her realise that dream.

On the television as Elizabeth ate her breakfast, a newsman described large crowds gathering around Central. It was all her mother, Birdie, needed to hear. “Turn that thing off!” she shouted. Should anyone say something nasty at her, she counselled Elizabeth, pretend not to hear them. Or better yet, be nice, and put them to shame.

Lots of white people lined Park Street as Elizabeth headed towards the school. As she passed the Mobil station and came nearer, she could see the white students filtering unimpeded past the soldiers. To her, it was a sign that everything was all right. But as she herself approached, three Guardsmen, two with rifles, held out their arms, directing her to her left, to the far side of Park.

A crowd had started to form behind Elizabeth, and her knees began to shake. She continued down Park. For an instant, she faced the school: it just looked so big! …

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David Goldman has long predicted Egypt would descend into chaos.

Sunday’s massacre of protesting Copts is heartbreaking; from the initial reports, several thousand Christians marched to protest the military government’s blind eye towards Muslim violence “when they were attacked by thugs carrying swords and clubs,” according to one Copt. The Egyptian government says that the Christian protesters began firing live ammunition at soldiers. That stretches credibility. …

… No-one appears in charge. Central bank foreign exchange reserves are down to just $19 billion, or four months’ imports, the Financial Times reported last week. “After negotiating a loan from the International Monetary Fund, the military council decided to scrap it, partly on fears of popular criticism – the IMF has a negative reputation in Egypt because of its association with harsh structural adjustment programmes. In addition, only $500m of some $7bn of promised aid from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have arrived so far.”

Egypt literally will run out of food. It imports half its caloric consumption, mainly wheat (although Egyptians eat less wheat than Iranians, Moroccans, Canadians, Turks and Russians). Egypt spends $5.5 billion a year on food subsidies. Its social solidarity minister wants to change the system (which subsidizes some people who can afford to pay more than the penny a loaf the government charges), but seems deeply confused. “‘We need to change consumer habits so that we are not consuming so much bread. In Mexico, for example, they rely more on potatoes. Why can’t we start shifting toward that?’said Saad Nassar, adviser to the agriculture minister.” Mr. Nassar seems unaware that Mexicans eat more corn than wheat or potatoes. This discussion would be comical if not for the fact that Egypt is about to run out of money to pay for any sort of food. …

Andrew McCarthy and Mark Steyn post on Egypt in The Corner. Here’s Mark.

Andy, good luck rousing the western media to the plight of Egypt’s Christians. The boobs proclaimed Tahrir Square an “Arab Spring” and then moved on. I chanced to be on Fox News with Megyn Kelly half-an-hour after Mubarak threw in the towel, and, while Anderson Cooper was cooing orgasmically over on CNN, offered the cheerless thought that this was the dawn of the post-western Middle East, and the beginning of something potentially very dark. I’ll stand by that. As I wrote in February:

“The Kingdom of Egypt in the period between 1922 and 1952 was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it got closer to a functioning, pluralist society than anything in the 60 years since. For example, in 1923, Egypt’s first full year as a sovereign state, the country’s Minister of Finance was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a Member of Parliament and a Jew.”

Try to imagine that now: a Jew serving as an Arab Muslim nation’s Finance Minister – or even getting elected as an obscure backbench MP. Sounds like something from a Give-peace-a-chance multifaith fantasy. But it actually happened – and then it stopped happening, and then it became inconceivable for it to happen ever again under any plausible scenario.

Shortly thereafter, Mr Cattaui’s great-grandson wrote to me from France, where he now lives. Because it’s not just that in Egypt a Jew can’t be Finance Minister but that a Jew can’t be. Because Egypt spent the second half of the 20th century getting worse, and is spending the new century getting worser. We now accept a Jew-free Egypt as a normal feature of life. No doubt we shall soon do the same with a Copt-free Egypt. But we could at least stop insulting those on the receiving end of the “Arab Spring” by pretending that it’s any kind of flowering of freedom.

Marc Thiessen details the mistakes of the “hapless” Holder.

President Obama says that he has “complete confidence” in Attorney General Eric Holder. That’s good news for Republicans. Pick almost any unnecessary, losing battle in Obama’s first term, and his hapless attorney general is at the center of it.

If not for the fact that so many of Holder’s decisions harm national security, he would be a political dream come true for the GOP – delivering up reliably disastrous controversies for the president every few months.

The latest controversy over whether Holder misled a House committee on “Operation Fast and Furious” — the botched federal gun sting that allowed hundreds of weapons to flow to Mexican drug cartels and resulted in the death of an ATF agent — is only the most recent of these debacles.

Holder’s bad advice began almost immediately after Obama took office, when he and White House counsel Greg Craig convinced the president to announce the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010 — without even examining the feasibility of doing so. Not only did the president suffer the indignity of missing this deadline, public opinion turned against the decision so sharply that Democrats abandoned the president and joined Republicans in voting 90-to-6 in the Senate to block funds for the facility’s closure. Almost three years later, Guantanamo remains open and the administration has given up hope of closing it.

The next unneeded firestorm came with Holder’s decision to release classified Justice Department memos on the CIA terrorist interrogation program and reopen criminal investigations into the conduct of CIA interrogators. Holder overrode the objections of five CIA directors, including Leon Panetta. According to The Post, “Before his decision to reopen the cases, Holder did not read detailed memos that [career] prosecutors drafted and placed in files to explain their decision to decline prosecutions.” If he had bothered to do so, he could have predicted the eventual outcome: The special prosecutor he appointed came to the same conclusion as the career prosecutors under the Bush administration and found no criminal wrongdoing by the CIA officials involved in the agency’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. After two years of wasted resources and needless controversy, Holder came up empty. …

Continuing with the Holder theme, Roger Simon reviews the book written by a career lawyer in the Justice Dept. who quit in disgust.

J. Christian Adams is an American hero and his new book INJUSTICE: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department is an indispensable work for our time.

But be warned that I — as reviewers often are, even if they don’t say so — am biased, quite obviously so. From page 155 of Adams’ book: “The following week, I received an unexpected phone call from Roger Simon asking me to become a contributor to his media site Pajamas Media, one of the leading conservative news websites. I accepted his offer, and soon began writing about issues such as civil rights and the ongoing activities of the Obama DOJ.”

I make no claim of editorial brilliance for drafting Christian then. An attorney for the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice, he had just resigned after the testimony of Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez in the now infamous New Black Panther case. He wanted to blow the whistle on what he came to call the racialist (inordinately tilted in favor of minorities, largely African-American) policies and actions of the DOJ. And I was the perfect audience — having been a voter registration worker myself during the Civil Rights Movement (South Carolina 1966). I was appalled by what he told me.

So I do take inordinate pride in the subsequent writings of Christian Adams on PJMedia. They have had a significant, and growing, impact on our country and justice system. They are arguably the most socially useful articles our company has published.

That out of the way, let me turn to why I believe Injustice may be the most important American publication this year. …

Thomas Sowell also reviews Adams’ book.

… Attorney General Eric Holder became a key figure epitomizing the view that government’s role in racial matters was not to be an impartial dispenser of equal justice for all, but to be a racial partisan and an organ of racial payback. He has been too politically savvy to say that in so many words, but his actions have spoken far louder than any words.

The case that first gave the general public a glimpse of Attorney General Holder’s views and values was one in which young black thugs outside a voting site in Philadelphia were televised intimidating white voters. When this episode was broadcast, it produced public outrage.

Although the Department of Justice’s prosecution of these thugs began in the last days of the Bush administration, and the defendants had offered no legal defense, the case was dropped by the Justice Department after Eric Holder took over. One of the lawyers who were prosecuting that case resigned in protest.

That lawyer — J. Christian Adams — has now written a book, titled “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” It is a thought-provoking book and a shocking book in what it reveals about the inner workings of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division.

Bad as the Justice Department’s decision was to drop that particular case, which it had already won in court, this book makes painfully clear that this was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. …

Peter Wehner writes on the “divisive” president.

A Washington Post story from earlier this week reports, “There is a noticeably more aggressive, confrontational President Obama roaming the country these days, selling his jobs plan and attacking Republicans for standing in the way of progress by standing up only for the rich.” That report, if anything, understates things a bit. Obama has essentially given up on his governing responsibilities (at which he has shown himself to be terribly inept) in lieu of a fierce and near constant attack on his political opponents. I have my doubts as to whether that strategy will work. But the point I want to make is a different one, which is that Obama has become the most intentionally divisive president we’ve seen in quite some time.

It’s not unusual, of course, for the policies of presidents to divide the nation. And politicians running for re-election often highlight differences. But Obama now belongs in a separate category. Each day, it seems, he and/or his supporters are seeking to divide us. The rhetoric employed by the president and his allies is meant to fan the flames of resentment, to turn Americans against one another, and to stoke up feelings of envy, grievances, and rage.

This is not healthy for our country or good for our political culture. And while we all contribute to what constitutes public discourse, there is one officeholder, the president, who bears the greatest responsibility for creating a sense of common purpose and for reminding us that we are, in the words of the Pledge of Allegiance, “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Yet the president is trying, with almost every speech, to pry us apart. It’s a strategy he clearly believes is necessary for him to win re-election. But that doesn’t make what he’s doing any less shameful or any less hypocritical. …

And Steve Hayward posts in Powerline on the ignorant president. Seems he wanted to go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to apologize. The Japanese saved him from that mistake. If you read Pickings from July 14th, you’ll remember Pickerhead retailed the thought that Truman saved many Japanese lives with his decisions to drop the bombs.

I recall seeing some online grandee—I thought it was Rich Karlgaard of Forbes, but I can’t find it—explain that in the fullness of time Wikileaks would turn around and bite liberals in the rear end, and sure enough there’s been a steady stream of Wikileaks that confirm what we already know about Obama.  But still.

Over the last couple of weeks several Japanese newspapers have been all over a new Wikileak that so far has not made much of an impression anywhere in American media.  (I know: This is a surprise?)  It seems that Obama wanted to include stops at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of his 2009 World Apology Tour, so that he could apologize for Harry Truman dropping the Big One to end World War II.

Telegraph, UK with a story about a photo from our difficult past.

On her first morning of school, September 4 1957, Elizabeth Eckford’s primary concern was looking nice. Her mother had done her hair the night before; an elaborate two-hour ritual, with a hot iron and a hotter stove, of straightening and curling. Then there were her clothes. People in black Little Rock knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore they made themselves, and not from the basic patterns of McCall’s but from the more complicated ones in Vogue. It was a practice borne of tradition, pride, and necessity: homemade was cheaper, and it spared black children the humiliation of having to ask to try things on in the segregated department stores downtown.

In the fall of 1957, Elizabeth was among the nine black students who had enlisted, then been selected, to enter Little Rock Central High School.

Central was the first high school in a major southern city set to be desegregated since the United States Supreme Court had ruled three years earlier in Brown vs Board of Education that separate and ostensibly equal education was unconstitutional. Inspired both by Thurgood Marshall, who had argued the case of plaintiff Oliver L Brown, and Clarence Darrow, Elizabeth wanted to become a lawyer, and she thought Central would help her realise that dream.

On the television as Elizabeth ate her breakfast, a newsman described large crowds gathering around Central. It was all her mother, Birdie, needed to hear. “Turn that thing off!” she shouted. Should anyone say something nasty at her, she counselled Elizabeth, pretend not to hear them. Or better yet, be nice, and put them to shame.

Lots of white people lined Park Street as Elizabeth headed towards the school. As she passed the Mobil station and came nearer, she could see the white students filtering unimpeded past the soldiers. To her, it was a sign that everything was all right. But as she herself approached, three Guardsmen, two with rifles, held out their arms, directing her to her left, to the far side of Park.

A crowd had started to form behind Elizabeth, and her knees began to shake. She continued down Park. For an instant, she faced the school: it just looked so big! …

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We start off with chilling economic news from the NY Times.

LET’S face it: economic forecasting is an act of sheer hubris. Which, of course, only incites people to do it.

The stock market offers its predictions, and, occasionally, it’s even right. As the economist Paul Samuelson once put it: “The stock market has called nine of the last five recessions.”

Economists have an even worse record, particularly when it comes to predicting downturns. In 1929, for instance, the Harvard Economic Society declared that a depression was “outside the range of probability.” Whoops.

Then there is the matter of the last recession. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that the downturn began in December 2007. Few people realized it at the time. A survey by Blue Chip Economic Indicators that month found that, as a group, economists believed that the economy would grow by 2.2 percent in 2008. Instead, it began to shrink.

Are we heading into another recession now? Again, the consensus says we’re not.

But at least one organization with an exceptionally good track record says another recession may already be here. That is the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a private forecasting firm based in Manhattan. It was founded by Geoffrey H. Moore, an economist who helped originate the practice of using leading indicators to predict business cycles. Mr. Moore died in 2000, but the team he trained is still at work.

Relying on a series of proprietary indexes, the institute correctly predicted the beginning and the end of the last recession. Over the last 15 years, it has gotten all of its recession calls right, while issuing no false alarms.

That’s why it’s worth paying attention to its current forecast. It’s chilling: as bad as the economy has been, it’s about to get worse. …

Writing in the WSJ, David Henderson gives us the scoop on the new econ Nobels.

… Mr. Sargent was an early and important contributor to the “rational expectations” revolution in macroeconomics, an area for which his sometime collaborator, Robert E. Lucas Jr., won the Nobel Prize in 1995. One of Mr. Sargent’s key early contributions, along with University of Minnesota economist Neil Wallace, was the idea that people’s expectations about government fiscal and monetary policy make it difficult for government officials to affect the economy in the ways they intend to.

If, for example, people get used to the Federal Reserve increasing the money supply when unemployment rises, they will expect higher inflation and will adjust their wage demands higher also. The result: The lower unemployment rate that the Fed was trying to achieve with looser monetary policy won’t happen.

This conclusion was at odds with the Keynesian model, which dominated economic thinking from the late 1930s to the early 1970s. The Keynesian model posited a stable trade-off between inflation and unemployment. In 1970, major U.S. econometric models, built on Keynesian assumptions, predicted that the government could get the unemployment rate down to 4% if it accepted an increase in inflation to 4%. In a 1977 article titled “Is Keynesian Economics a Dead End?” Mr. Sargent wrote, “[I]nstead of 4-4, in the mid-1970s we got 9-9, a very improbable occurrence if econometric models of 1969 had been correct.”

In his later work, Mr. Sargent explored expectations in other contexts. An important one is the issue of how a government can end high inflation. Mr. Sargent studied four countries that had hyperinflation in the early 1920s—Germany, Austria, Hungary and Poland. All used inflation to finance high government deficits. They all succeeded in eliminating hyperinflation, but to do so they had to be credible. Of course, they got rid of their old currencies and started new ones. But they also had to affect people’s expectations by committing to substantially lower budget deficits. All four governments did. …

Forbes essay on how “spreading the wealth ‘ results in spreading the misery.

… A permanent increase in marginal tax rates may spread the misery to those with higher incomes, but it will kill, not create jobs in the U.S. economy.  Personal income tax rates are the equivalent of a tariff on the employment of U.S. workers. The higher tariffs are, the less trade, or in this case, less domestic commerce takes place.  Higher domestic tariffs on small business men and women, for example, reduce their cash flow while reducing their opportunities to engage in activities that produce an acceptable, after-tax return on their capital employed.  Less trade,  fewer jobs and a higher misery index are the result.

Bi-partisan support for the Chinese Trade Bill is another threat to the outlook. The bill would supposedly save U.S. jobs by raising the price of Chinese imports by 25% by either forcing the Chinese to raise the value of their currency relative to the dollar, or by imposing 25% tariffs on Chinese made goods.  The idea:  spread the misery of the lackluster U.S. economy to the Chinese.

The rhetoric in support of this policy appeals to our pro-American instincts, and general sense of solidarity with our fellow citizens.  But if implemented, such a plan would only drive the misery index higher still.

First, raising the price of Chinese goods is the equivalent of legislating a pay cut for every American who now has to pay more for many of the goods at his or her local store. Second, paying more for Chinese imports means we will have less money to spend on other goods and services, most of which are provided by American workers.  So, while a few jobs may be saved and the profits of favored U.S. corporations protected, thousands of jobs no doubt would be lost.

Nor can government create jobs by imposing new regulations on the economy. This truth is demonstrated by the price controls on debit card swipe fees mandated by the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank “financial reform” bill.  On October 1, these fees were cut to about 24 cents from 44 cents per transaction. …

Democracy in America blog on the chaos created by government in the corn markets.

THIS fascinating installment of “Planet Money” on the farmland boom in Iowa is evidence that college towns occupy an alternate dimension; I had to listen to NPR to learn that the value of the rolling farmland I drive through every few days has more than doubled in the last few years. So why the boom?

The “Planet Money” presenters, Robert Smith and Dan Charles, cite three “global economic forces” that have pushed up land prices here in Iowa. Since there’s not yet a transcript, here’s my paraphrase:

1. Ben Bernanke. Near-zero interest rates have made borrowing to buy farmland look attractive. Money in the bank isn’t earning much, and the return on good Iowa farmland these days averages about 4% a year.

2. Corn prices. Most farmland in Iowa is devoted to corn. (The second most common crop, soybeans, yields a lower return but crop rotation is necessary to keep the soil in shape for bounteous corn yields.) The price of corn drives farm profitability, and the price of corn has gone up.

3. Oil prices. Oil prices drive corn prices. This year more American corn will go to ethanol factories than animal feed, which is a first. Farms in Iowa are now largely in the energy business. This is in part a creation of government policy. Ethanol subsidies get farmers $.45 in tax breaks for every gallon of ethanol, which comes to about 6 billion a year, propping up corn and land prices.

John Tamny writes on the real problem with Solyndra.

Dissembling about the capital destruction debacle that was his Administration’s loan guarantee to bankrupt green-energy firm Solyndra, President Obama told ABC News last week that “if we want to compete with China, which is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into this space…we’ve got to make sure that our guys here in the United States of America at least have a shot.”

Of course if the president were better schooled in basic economics, he would well understand that “our guys” do have a shot to compete in this space thanks to U.S. capital markets being the deepest in the world. Thanks to angel financing, venture capital, PIPEs, convertible bonds, bonds themselves, and stock issuance, those with a good idea have myriad options when it comes to marrying their innovation with capital.

And there lies the obvious problem with Solyndra. Unable to raise needed operating funds in the private markets, it was forced to go to the federal government to get what our markets would not provide.

The implications for our economy are similarly obvious. Though $535 million is presently a laughable sum to a government that knows no limits, and which doles out a great deal more to support the waste that increasingly symbolizes Washington, there’s an unseen quality to this.

Indeed, what’s continuously forgotten by our federal minders is that they have no resources. For the Obama administration to guarantee a $500 million dollar loan is for it to ultimately extract $500 million from the private economy where it might have actually funded a real, economy enhancing concept. …

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Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor explains the latest jive from Europe.

Following Europe’s plan of the week to deal with its sovereign debt crisis (and directly associated banking crisis) can make one’s head spin.  It might therefore help to try to identify a few central concepts that can help put the details of this plan or that into perspective.

A key distinction is between measures intended to prevent things from getting worse, and those intended to allocate losses already incurred; the interaction between those issues is an important factor in the dynamics, and will play a huge role in determining the ultimate outcome.

In terms of preventing things from getting worse, the near-term danger Europe faces is runs on sovereigns, especially Italy. …

… Someone with a weapon is confronted by a crowd of 100 people.  If all 100 rush him, he’s had it.  But someone has to start the rush, and the first mover is at greatest risk of getting shot, so each person may hold back wanting someone else to take the lead, allowing the outnumbered gunman to escape unharmed.  But some in the crowd may be hotheaded and charge.  Here’s where the nature of the weapon matters.  If it’s a single shot pistol, once the hothead is shot the rest of the crowd knows its in no danger and will charge.  If it’s a revolver, it takes six hotheads to start a run.  If it’s an automatic with 10 rounds in the magazine, it takes even more hotheads. (To make the analogy fit, there has to be some advantage of being first to get to the guy with the gun.)

The European plans are all based on the idea of convincing investors that there are a lot of bullets in the gun in the hope that this will deter a self-feeding run.  This is why Europe is so focused on expanding the size of backstop funds, including the use of ECB leverage.  The bigger the country that is at risk of a run, the bigger the fund must be to reduce the likelihood of a run.  This is why Italy’s problems are a real challenge to Europe.  Italy’s debt is so much larger than Greece’s or Portugal’s that commensurately bigger sums are needed to reassure investors that a run cannot get started. …

Gretchen Morgenson has more.

… Some investors who have been worrying about potential losses associated with European banks may have taken comfort in the results of financial stress tests conducted earlier this year by the Committee of European Banking Supervisors. Of the 91 top European banks tested — accounting for 65 percent of bank assets — only seven failed the toughest measures.

But, as an August report by Dun & Bradstreet pointed out, these tests were not as stringent as they might have been. They only assessed the risks posed by deteriorating assets in banks’ trading accounts. The tests did not measure those assets carried in the so-called held-to-maturity accounts.

“In order to give a more adequate picture of European financial sector risk beyond the short term,” Dun & Bradstreet said, “we believe the hold-to-maturity bonds should have been included in the stress tests.” There is clearly a great deal that investors do not know about exposures to Europe, notwithstanding the assurances from Mr. Geithner and others. Three years ago, investors were ignorant of the risks in faulty mortgage securities. If we’ve learned anything from that episode, it’s that what you don’t know can, in fact, hurt you.

A critique of TARP from Forbes. 

The $700 billion “Troubled Asset Relief Program” (TARP) was enacted in Washington three years ago this week, and while most economists, policymakers and journalists still believe it made things better (“helping us avoid a second Great Depression,” they like to say), in fact it made things much worse – and today we’re still suffering from its bearish effects. As just one example, a similar scheme, modeled on TARP – the “European Financial Stability Facility” (EFSF) – is being adopted abroad, further undermining bank stocks.

Those who fail to grasp TARP’s true impact will find it difficult to comprehend the currently-bearish impact of the EFSF. The problem with most U.S. banks in 2008 was not that they were “under-capitalized” but that they held so many shaky (sub-prime) residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), assets which bank regulators insisted were some of the safest assets they could own, because they were “backed” by the taxpayer-backed mortgage GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and thus required virtually no capital.

Instead of U.S. banks shedding bad assets, merging and raising private capital, TARP compelled them to take unwanted, high-cost capital injections with “strings attached” that became a noose around their necks. Similarly, the problem with Europe’s shakier banks today is not they’re “under-capitalized” but that they hold shaky government bonds (issued by Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, etc.), assets which bank regulators insisted were the safest things they could possibly own, and thus required little or no capital.

TARP didn’t prevent the crisis of September-October 2008 but contributed to it. Of course, the initial root cause of the bearishness was the U.S. recession that had already begun in December 2007, long before TARP was concocted, and which was caused by the Fed’s deliberate and prior inversion of the Treasury yield curve. That policy narrowed banks’ net interest margins, killed the incentive for credit intermediation (“borrowing short, lending long”), and cratered asset prices, wiping out some banks’ capital cushions. …

How’s this for a Steve Jobs obit? It’s from Dilbert.

I once thought his success was mostly a matter of luck. Anyone can be at the right place at the right time.

But then he did it again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

He was my only hero.

Niall Ferguson with an interesting essay.

… So the question is not, how do we produce more Steves? The normal process of human reproduction will ensure a steady supply of what Malcolm Gladwell has called “outliers.” The question should be, how do we ensure that the next Steve Jobs fulfills his potential?

An adopted child, the biological son of a Syrian Muslim immigrant, a college dropout, a hippie who briefly converted to Buddhism and experimented with LSD—Jobs was the type of guy no sane human resources department would have hired. I doubt that Apple itself would hire someone with his résumé at age 20. The only chance he ever had to become a chief executive officer was by founding his own company.

And that—China, please note—is why capitalism needs to be embedded in a truly free society in order to flourish. In a free society a weirdo can do his own thing. In a free society he can even fail at his own thing, as Jobs undoubtedly did in his first stint in charge of Apple. And in a free society he can bounce back and revolutionize all our lives.

Somewhere in his father’s native Syria another Steve Jobs has just died. But this other Steve was gunned down by a tyrannical government. And what wonders his genius might have produced we shall never know.

Andrew Malcolm with late-night humor.

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Mark Steyn posts on the “Occupy” group as the antithesis to the life of Steve Jobs.

… Who was Steve Jobs? Well, he was a guy who founded a corporation and spent his life as a corporate executive manufacturing corporate products. So he wouldn’t have endeared himself to the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, even though, underneath the patchouli and lentils, most of them are abundantly accessorized with iPhones and iPads and iPods loaded with iTunes, if only for when the drum circle goes for a bathroom break.

The above is a somewhat obvious point, although the fact that it’s not obvious even to protesters with an industrial-strength lack of self-awareness is a big part of the problem. But it goes beyond that: If you don’t like to think of Jobs as a corporate exec (and a famously demanding one at that), think of him as a guy who went to work, and worked hard. There’s no appetite for that among those “occupying” Zuccotti Park. In the old days, the tribunes of the masses demanded an honest wage for honest work. Today, the tribunes of America’s leisured varsity class demand a world that puts “people before profits.” If the specifics of their “program” are somewhat contradictory, the general vibe is consistent: They wish to enjoy an advanced Western lifestyle without earning an advanced Western living. The pampered, elderly children of a fin de civilisation overdeveloped world, they appear to regard life as an unending vacation whose bill never comes due. …

… Why did Steve Jobs do so much of his innovating in computers? Well, obviously, because that’s what got his juices going. But it’s also the case that, because it was a virtually nonexistent industry until he came along, it’s about the one area of American life that hasn’t been regulated into sclerosis by the statist behemoth. So Apple and other companies were free to be as corporate as they wanted, and we’re the better off for it. The stunted, inarticulate spawn of America’s educrat monopoly want a world of fewer corporations and lots more government. If their “demands” for a $20 minimum wage and a trillion dollars of spending in “ecological restoration” and all the rest are ever met, there will be a massive expansion of state monopoly power. Would you like to get your iPhone from the DMV? That’s your “American Autumn”: an America that constrains the next Steve Jobs but bigs up Van Jones. Underneath the familiar props of radical chic that hasn’t been either radical or chic in half a century, the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement are a paradox too ludicrous even for the malign alumni of a desultory half-decade of Complacency Studies: they’re anarchists for Big Government. Do it for the children, the Democrats like to say. They’re the children we did it for, and, if this is the best they can do, they’re done for.

Bill Kristol has more on Occupy.

… Occupy Wall Street may peter out and have no lasting significance whatsoever. And the respectful coverage by some in the media, the earnest attempts by bien-pensant commentators to guide the protesters to a coherent policy agenda, the evident nostalgia of Baby Boomers for the palmy days of their youth in the ’60s, the painful envy on the left of the success of the Tea Party?—?it’s all somewhat comical.

However: In politics, sometimes you have to take idiocy seriously. The complaints in the ’60s against life in oppressive Amerika were childish. The nuclear freeze movement of the early ’80s was foolish. The anti-Iraq war movement of a few years ago was both silly (“Bush lied, people died”) and disgraceful (“General Betray Us”). But movements can have political impact even if they aren’t worth much morally or intellectually or even numerically. And while one would hope the main effect of such flaky movements would be to discredit their allies, it doesn’t always work out that way. “General Betray Us” did not, for instance, prevent a big Democratic win in 2008. …

James Pethokoukis on the subject.

President Barack Obama’s amazing news conference yesterday made one thing abundantly clear: America’s #1 community organizer—in a switcheroo—has himself now been organized by a community, in particular those demonstrators up in New York and several other cities across America.

To the extent that the ideological circus of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) agrees on much, it’s that inequality is what really ails America—and more government is the solution. And Obama apparently couldn’t agree more. During the Q&A with reporters at the White House, Obama endorsed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plan to pay for Obama’s jobs bill with a massive surtax on the rich, saying he was “comfortable” and “fine” with it. Obama then embarked upon a lengthy impression of consumer-teer Elizabeth Warren as he railed against banks trying to make big profits by tricking consumers (while failing to note that few people other than Dodd and Frank think banks are no longer “too big to fail”). …

We’ll give David Goldman (Spengler) the last word on the subject.

… the Wall Street protesters are foolish and petulant. American households levered a $6 trillion net inflow of foreign savings during the decade 1998 through 2007 into a bubble that benefited them far more than it did Wall Street. The impact of the bubble on the household balance sheet exceeds the growth in real-estate assets, moreover, because most small business expansion followed the housing bubble.

For fifteen years we rode a tsunami of foreign capital pouring into American markets. We didn’t save a penny. Why should we? Our home equity was our retirement account. Our smartest kids got MBAs and went to Wall Street derivatives desks. Engineering was for dummies. Home prices rose so fast that local governments swam with tax revenues and hired with abandon. Everybody went to the party. Now everybody has a hangover, especially the bankers. We thought we were geniuses because we won the lottery. Now we actually have to produce and export things, and we have to play catch-up. Our kids are competing with Asian kids who go to cram school and practice the violin in the afternoon. This isn’t going to be easy, and the sooner we decide to roll up our sleeves and get back to work instead of looking for bankers to blame, the better our chances of coming back.

Marc Thiessen liked Romney’s foreign policy address.

Mitt Romney did today what no other major presidential contender has: lay out a clear foreign policy vision. In a very good address at the Citadel, he explained the threats America faces in this new century—from Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, to a failed nuclear state in Pakistan, to a China leading a global alliance of authoritarian regimes, to a Western hemisphere dominated by Hugo Chavez’s malign socialism. And he made clear that the only response to these disparate challenges is a new American Century in which “America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world.” …

… Romney concluded: “I will not surrender America’s role in the world. This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your president. You have that president today.”

Indeed. Now it is time for the other candidates to step forward and lay out their own visions for America’s role in the world.

Jennifer Rubin is a fan also.

The roll out of Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team, a major address and a comprehensive white paper on his views on national security reveal two things about the candidate, one we have seen before and another less apparent up until now.

As he did on his jobs plan, Romney’s foreign policy rollout is detailed, organized, professional and aided by very smart people. The logistics of assembling a big team of top advisors, crafting a short but bold speech and coming up with a detailed written document are daunting and impressive. The level of detail is unlike anything any other candidate has attempted, and far exceeds what we usually get in campaigns. This is Romney the executive, Romney the smart guy and Romney the polished professional. His message is clear: I’m prepared and I know what I am doing.

But what is surprising about his foreign policy effort is that unlike his economic plans and what has come top be seen as a character defect (e.g. lack of strong convictions) his foreign policy statements are bold, unqualified, and not couched for political advantage.

At the Citadel he offered himself as the not-President Obama: …

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Here’s a pleasant change. Instead of writing about the cretin, we get an analysis from Charles Krauthammer on the particle that possibly passed light. In a race, that is. 

… The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana — the sinews of a postwar world that feels today to be unraveling.

I am talking about something far more important. Which is why it made only the back pages of your newspaper, if it made it at all. Scientists at CERN, the European high-energy physics consortium, have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light. …

Continuing the Obama free zone, The Economist has a good send off for Steve Jobs.

WHEN it came to putting on a show, nobody else in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter, could match Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand alone on a black stage and conjure up an “incredible” new electronic gadget in front of an awed crowd, were the performances of a master showman. All computers do is fetch and shuffle numbers, he once explained, but do it fast enough and “the results appear to be magic”. Mr Jobs, who died this week aged 56, spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed, easy-to-use products.

The reaction to his death, with people leaving candles and flowers outside Apple stores and the internet humming with tributes from politicians, is proof that Mr Jobs had become something much more significant than just a clever money-maker. He stood out in three ways—as a technologist, as a corporate leader and as somebody who was able to make people love what had previously been impersonal, functional gadgets. Strangely, it is this last quality that may have the deepest effect on the way people live. The era of personal technology is in many ways just beginning. …

Here’s Jim Cramer on Steve Jobs too.

… He created an ecosystem that allowed all people to figure out everything. Sure, Intel and Microsoft harnessed power in smaller-form factors from the behemoths that were invented by IBM. But they harnessed them only in ways that were too difficult for so, so many.

Not Jobs.

He created them so that they were simple machines. It is as if Jobs invented the wheel, and the wedge, the screw, the pulley, the lever and the inclined plane.

We take them for granted now, like the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. But they were invented once, too. Can you imagine if one man invented all of them? Would you still think that he was only as good as Ford or Carnegie? Bell?

Of course it wasn’t enough that the devices worked. They were brilliant to look at and attractive by nature. As if they were feats of nature, lyrical even.

It’s as if he invented devices like Mozart and Beethoven wrote music. Even more so, Beethoven’s best work was accomplished when he went deaf while writing the Pastoral Symphony. How much more did Jobs give us when he got his death sentence eight years ago? A fury of invention buttressed by a level of courage that is unimaginable given the pain he must have endured.

Oh, and just for the moment, let’s talk about wealth creation — $350 billion of it. He has paid for more tuition and more retirement and more vacations and more meals on the table than anyone ever, maybe more than Edison, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Walton and Bell combined. Empirically, as a commercial success? Best ever. …

And Clive Crook thinks the new iPhone is pretty neat.

… Today a few people have told me, by the way, that disappointment over the new iPhone is a sign of things to come: the first post-Jobs product launch was a letdown. Well, I think Jobs’ departure will be a crippling setback, but this was not the first post-Jobs product launch (it will be a year or two before we see the first Apple product that Jobs did not direct from the moment of conception) and I’ll have you know the new iPhone is no letdown.

The new device is an impressive advance over its predecessor in every respect but for the look. (It’s still beautiful.) I’d say this, even if it did not introduce Siri, the natural-language voice-control feature. I’m surprised this has not caused more of a stir. It could be revolutionary, don’t you think? We’ll see how well it works in ordinary use when consumers get hold of it, but I thought the Apple demo was startling. Jobs at his best, even if he wasn’t there. Usable voice control will be a far, far bigger breakthrough than touch-screens when it comes–and it may just have arrived.

Mark Steyn reminds us to think about Europe.

In 1853 or thereabouts, Czar Nicholas I described Turkey as the sick man of Europe. A century and a half later, Turkey is increasingly the strong man of the Middle East, and the sick man of Europe is Europe — or, rather, “Europe.” The transformation of a geographical patchwork of nation-states into a single political entity has been the dominant Big Idea of the post-war era, the Big Idea the Continent’s elites turned to after all the other Big Ideas — Fascism, Nazism, and eventually Communism — failed, spectacularly. The West’s last Big Idea is now dying in the eurozone debt crisis. Although less obviously malign than the big totalitarian -isms, this particular idea has proved so insinuating and debilitating that the only question is whether most of the West dies with it.

“Europe” has a basic identity crisis: As the Germans have begun to figure out, just because the Greeks live in the same general neighborhood is no reason to open a joint checking account. And yet a decade ago, when it counted, everyone who mattered on the Continent assumed a common currency for nations with nothing in common was so obviously brilliant an idea it was barely worth explaining to the masses. In the absence of ethnic or cultural compatibility, the European Union offered Big Government as a substitute: The project was propped up by two pillars — social welfare and defense welfare. The former regulated Europe into economic sloth even as India, China, and Brazil began figuring out how this capitalism thing worked. The latter meant that the U.S. defense umbrella ensured once-lavish budgets for hussars and lancers could be reallocated to government health care and other lollipops — and it still wasn’t enough. Whatever the individual merits of ever-more-leisurely education, 30-hour work weeks, six weeks’ vacation, retirement at 50, the cumulative impact is that not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. And once large numbers of people acquire the habits of a leisured class, there are not many easy ways back to reality. …

Last month’s jobs report of 103,000 new jobs was a welcome sight. What was it like 28 years ago when Reagan was president? The country added 1.1 million jobs in one month!!!  WSJ Editors have the story.

… As it happens, the biggest one-month jobs gain in American history was at exactly this juncture of the Reagan Presidency, after another deep recession. In September 1983, coming out of the 1981-82 downturn, American employers added 1.1 million workers to their payrolls, the acceleration point for a seven-year expansion that created some 17 million new jobs. …

Tony Blankley wants to praise Romney’s “flexibility.” 

William F. Buckley Jr., founding father of the modern conservative movement, famously asserted his doctrine of voting for the most conservative candidate who is electable. Let me presume to add an analytic codicil: The GOP and the conservative movement have tended to support the most conservative policies only when they are understood to be conservative and are plausibly supportable by the conservative half of the electorate.

As the ideological center of gravity on various issues has shifted back and forth across the conservative-liberal spectrum over the decades, so inevitably has conservative policy support. I have in mind four examples: abortion, federal aid to education, “cap-and-trade” and individual health mandates.

As a campaigner for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in all his campaigns, starting in his 1966 campaign for governor of California, I can vividly recall that in 1964, Goldwater and the conservative movement were against federal aid to education in its entirety.

But as the decades advanced, even the most conservative voters came to support at least federal loans for college students, if not other federal education aid programs, such as for the handicapped. …

To start the humor section, David Harsanyi has a manifesto for Occupy Wall Street.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, women and transgendered — and any other human who is able to elude the tyranny of work for a couple of weeks — are created equal. We gather to be free not of tyranny, but of responsibility and college tuitions. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that a government long established and a nation long prosperous be changed for light and transient causes. So let our demands* be submitted to a candid world.

First, we are imbued with as many inalienable rights as a few thousand college kids and a gaggle of borderline celebrities can concoct, among them a guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment and immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness — even if that debt was acquired taking on a mortgage with a 4.1 percent interest rate and no money down, which, we admit, is a pretty sweet deal in historical context but down with the modern gilded age!

We demand that a Master of Fine Arts in musical theater writing, with a minor in German, become an immutable human right, because education is crucial and rich people can afford to fund unemployment checks until we find jobs or in perpetuity, whichever comes first. …

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Victor Davis Hanson writes on “The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance.” This could have used an editor, but contains the germs of interesting thoughts.

… I, like many, am worried about the Republican field — as is the custom at this early stage. There is more to be endured in 2012. The Obama decline will spark venomous politics of the sort we haven’t seen in years. This time hope and change will be even more “Bush did it!/’You’re all racists!/“They” will take your Social Security.” The financial crisis is not over. We are not yet at the beginning of the end for statism, but the Churchillian end of its new beginning.

Still, let us cheer up a bit. The country always knew, but for just a bit forgot, that you cannot print money and borrow endlessly. It always knew that bureaucrats were less efficient than employers. It knew that Guantanamo was not a gulag and Iraq was not “lost.” But given the anguish over Iraq, the anger at Bush, the Obama postracial novelty and “centrist” façade, and the Freddie/Fannie/Wall Street collapse, it wanted to believe what it knew might not be true. Now three years of Obama have slapped voters out of their collective trance.

The spell has now passed; and we are stronger for its passing. There is going to be soon a sense of relief that we have not experienced in decades. In short, sadder but wiser Americans will soon be turned loose with a vigor unseen in decades. …

James Pethokoukis says the numbers are working against the administration.

The Misery Index—the sum of the unemployment rate plus inflation rate—is a shorthand way of looking at how the U.S. economy might affect the political fortunes of American presidents. The current MI is around 13, which is as high as it’s been since the early 1980s when stagflation was finally loosening its grip. When Jimmy Carter was blown out by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the MI was around 20. When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, it was 8.

A more direct way of measuring the mood of America is by looking at various measures of sentiment. Pollsters frequently ask voters a) if they are “satisfied” with the way things are going, and b) if the country is “heading in the right direction.” By those metrics, as compiled by AEI, Obama looks to be in big trouble: …

Noemie Emery says he’s not that smart.

… If Obama had been a good politician, he would have realized that he had been elected not by a broad and deep swath of newly minted liberal voters, but by a temporary alliance of faithful progressives (numerous, but not enough to win elections) and centrist swing voters scared out of their wits by the crash. Before the crash, as David Paul Kuhn wrote on RealClearPolitics later, McCain led Obama in the Gallup polls for nine days in succession; after, he never led again. Before, Obama cracked the 50 percent mark only once, and that was at the peak of his convention; after, he passed it 33 times. He won nine states Bush had carried four years earlier, but in six of these (including Ohio and Florida) McCain tied or led him before September 15. Why? Most of these states had large, wealthy suburbs around their big cities, where stockholders and homeowners saw huge paper losses. It was during this period that Democrats made their gains among whites, and white males. 

At the same time as this massive swing towards the Democratic ticket, polls showed that the ideological split remained where it had been in the Clinton/Bush era: self-identified conservatives around 41 percent, moderates around 37 percent, liberals around 21 percent. Many people who voted for Obama were not in fact liberal, but centrist or center-right voters unnerved by the crash and the chaos in the Republican party, and drawn to Obama’s misleading aura of calm. This meant there was also a split in Obama’s electorate: The progressives liked his liberal ideas, the centrists his so-called “conservative” temperament; the progressives wanted transformation, the centrists stability; the progressives wanted the government grown, the centrists wanted the economy stabilized; the centrists were prepared for the small shift to the left that comes with the usual change from a center-right to a left-center government, the progressives were bent on sweeping and radical change. 

An adept politician would have looked at the polls and realized he had a frail coalition that had to be nudged along carefully, knowing schism would destroy his majority. Obama’s mistake was to assume that the shock of the crash had turned the center hard left and to govern accordingly. “The coalition that carried Obama to victory is every bit as sturdy as America’s last two dominant political coalitions: the ones that elected Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan,” wrote Peter Beinart, reflecting the view of the press and the president. As it happened, “the coalition that carried Obama to victory” would shatter in less than nine months. 

The coalition Obama never realized existed took its first hit in his first month, with his $800 billion stimulus package, which would fail to address the problem of job loss and fail in its long-run ambition to hold unemployment under 8 percent. It took its second hit just a month later, with a bailout for homeowners behind in their payments, prompting CNBC’s Rick Santelli to suggest dumping worthless derivatives into Lake Michigan, thus launching the Tea Party movement, which Obama and allies, with typical brilliance, dismissed. 

The third hit, and the one that proved fatal, was the launching of national health care, a sacred cause to the left but to no one else in the country, a massive restructuring of one-sixth of the country’s economy, which would prove a mistake in its timing (FDR had waited two years to introduce Social Security), a mistake in its structure, and a mistake in the way it was framed. To keep his coalition intact, it should have been incremental, built out from the center, and addressed to the main concern of the public, which was affordability. Instead, the plan that emerged from Congress was comprehensive, built out from the left, geared to help the uninsured (one-sixth of the country) at the expense of everything else in the system, and based on the premise, which no one believed, that it could expand subsidized coverage to millions of people while at the same time keeping costs down. 

This was not what the centrists had signed on for, and in the course of the summer, they started to flee. Obama’s numbers began drifting down from their astronomical highs to more human levels, and support for his bill into negative country. Democrats from purple and red states found themselves besieged by angry constituents, whose concerns Obama did nothing to appease or acknowledge. They then flung themselves into the arms of Republicans, who, dazed and despondent after Obama’s election, could scarcely believe their own luck.

In October, Democrats rammed the bill through the House, winning by 7 votes out of a 79-seat majority, with no Republicans voting in favor, and 34 Democrats voting against. In November came the off-year elections for governor, in New Jersey, a blue state which Obama had won a year earlier by a 15-point margin, and Virginia, a purple/red state which Obama had carried by 7. Obama wrapped his arms around Democrats Creigh Deeds and Jon Corzine. Independents, who had rallied for him a year earlier, looked, and ran hard in the other direction. Deeds lost by 18 points to Bob McDonnell. Corzine lost to Chris Christie by 3. 

In December, Democrats pushed the bill through the Senate, by means of hundreds of millions in bribes and kickbacks to wavering members of their own party. House speaker Nancy Pelosi called it a “gift for the American people.” The people thought differently. In January, Scott Brown won a Senate race in Massachusetts, taking the seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy, and becoming the first member of his party to represent his state in that body in 30 years. The bill was thought dead, and most Democrats breathed sighs of relief and exhaustion. But their perils were not over yet.

Proving there was no pain he would not inflict on his party, Obama seized on a loophole to push it back through the House, a Pickett’s charge of a mission which would prove a death sentence for many congressional Democrats. “The legislation has become a disaster,” wrote Howard Fineman in what used to be Newsweek. “The leaders of Troy knew they were making a mistake when they wheeled that horse into their besieged city, but they did it anyway. We’ll see what happens this fall.”

Obamacare passed the Senate 60-39, and they saw. “The Democrats’ hope with health care was that ‘people will like it after we pass it.’ Well, they hate it,” wrote pollster Pat Caddell in September. Time magazine found “a sense of disappointment, bordering on betrayal” among many voters. “In Nevada, a state Obama won with 55 percent, . . . only 29 percent of likely voters . . . think the president’s actions have helped the economy.” In Indiana, a state legislator said she was often approached by former Obama supporters who wanted to “vent” their frustrations: “Betrayed by the health care vote,” “He’s not what I voted for,” “What are they thinking when it comes to spending?” were the most common themes. 

In one go, the 2010 midterms wiped out the combined Democratic gains in the House of the previous two “wave” elections, took from them 6 seats in the Senate and 10 governorships, along with control of state houses, in swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. An army of rising young GOP stars vowed to work for health care repeal in the House and the Senate; governors vowed to work for repeal and resist implementation; and state attorneys general wasted no time in filing suits in federal courts to have the law declared unconstitutional. The use of wedge issues is common in politics—issues carefully selected to unite one party while dividing the other—but it is rare to use them against one’s own party. It takes an unusual politician to achieve this objective. One who’s not very good at his craft. 

Good politicians are in sync with their times, understand them, and deal with their challenges. But Obama is at odds, and often at war, with his own. In an age when debt is a problem, he is a big spender; when government has to cut back, he wants to expand both its expense and its reach. Nothing that happens appears to deter him, not the massive pushback from the American people in the 2009 and 2010 elections; not the crisis in Europe, kicked off by the collapse of Greece’s finances in April 2010, which caused an austerity panic all over Europe, and should have driven home the most cogent of lessons: that exactly as he was trying to turn his country into a social democracy like those of old Europe, which the American left had long admired, the European social democracies had been forced to admit that their model could not be sustained. 

The result is that Obama is now an outlier among the world’s leaders: …

Michael Barone says it is a mistake to keep step with unions.

Leadership is something you can’t be taught or learn, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said in his press conference Tuesday announcing he would not reverse his decision not to run for president. “Leadership today in America has to be about doing the big things and being courageous.”

No one doubts that Christie has shown this kind of leadership in New Jersey. Call him bombastic, call him confrontational, but don’t call him wobbly. He leads, and even with a Democratic-majority legislature, the state is moving in his direction.

Things are different on the national level. The day before Christie spoke in Trenton, the Obama White House officially delivered the free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama to Congress for approval. That was the 986th day that Barack Obama has been president.

He could have sent them 985 days earlier; negotiations were completed in 2006 and 2007. Or, if he were concerned they’d be deep-sixed when his fellow Democrats controlled Congress, he could have sent them 274 days earlier when Republicans took over the House.

To be sure, they are opposed by many labor union leaders and congressional Democrats. There is a nostalgia among many union and party old-timers for the days, more than 30 years distant, when the auto and steel workers’ unions had nearly 2 million members.

Now each has less than half a million. But the old-timers seem to feel that somehow something like those olden days can be brought back if they oppose FTAs.

Any responsible president has to take a different view. …

Josh Kraushaar says the president’s rhetoric and actions are incoherent.

President Obama’s reelection is in trouble because of the nation’s rocky economy, but he’s been exacerbating his problems by running a populist campaign at odds with the electoral strategy his advisers have laid out. Not only is his new rhetoric chastising the wealthy to pay their fair share at odds with the president’s well-crafted image of being a post-partisan uniter, but it risks alienating the white-collar professionals who have become an increasingly important part of a winning Democratic coalition.

The president’s team has been arguing that the path to reelection lies in winning diverse, white-collar battleground states like Colorado, Virginia, and North Carolina—more-affluent states with growing numbers of independents. But the president’s latest rhetoric, pitting the affluent against the middle class, threatens to turn off the very independents he’s seeking to win back. It’s the type of populist message that’s better geared toward blue-collar voters in the Rust Belt, which the campaign is viewing as close to a lost cause. …

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IBD Editors have nice things to say about the administration’s moves on trade bills.

After years of dithering and bowing to protectionists, President Obama finally submitted three pending free-trade pacts with South Korea, Panama and Colombia to Congress for a vote. Let the U.S. economy recover.

The president’s decision marks the first bright economic move he has made to boost the nation’s ailing economy. Dropping tariffs, opening markets and equalizing investment terms are a proven way to boost economic growth.

Contrary to all the nonsense about outsourcing and giant sucking sounds, the real impact of free trade is new freedom and opportunity.

The pacts are now on their way to a vote in Congress after a long delay, marking Obama’s first real shift from campaign demagogue captive to special interests to President of the entire U.S. …

Bret Stephens wonders why Obama treats so many to his contempt.

… Then again, the contempt Mr. Obama felt for the Bush administration was merely of a piece with the broader ambit of his disdain. Examples? Here’s a quick list:

The gratuitous return of the Churchill bust to Britain. The slam of the Boston police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates. The high-profile rebuke of the members of the Supreme Court at his 2010 State of the Union speech. The diplomatic snubs, petty as well as serious, of Gordon Brown, Benjamin Netanyahu and Nicolas Sarkozy. The verbal assaults on Wall Street “fat cats” who “caused the problem” of “10% unemployment.” The never-ending baiting of millionaires and billionaires and jet owners and everyone else who, as Black Entertainment Television’s Robert Johnson memorably put it on Sunday, “tried rich and tried poor and like rich better.”

Now we come to the last few days, in which Mr. Obama first admonished the Congressional Black Caucus to “stop complainin’, stop grumblin’, stop cryin’,” and later told a Florida TV station that America was losing its competitive edge because it “had gotten a little soft.” The first comment earned a rebuke from none other than Rep. Maxine Waters, while the second elicited instant comparisons to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. They tell us something about the president’s political IQ. They tell us more about his world view. …

Peter Wehner figured out why the president doesn’t like us anymore.

According to President Obama, America has “gotten a little soft” during the last few decades. That revelation is a relatively new one for Obama, who during the campaign assured us that “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” As Obama hop-scotched around the country, he informed us that “We are the hope of the future – the answer to the cynics who tell us … we cannot remake this world as it should be.” Back then, “what began as a whisper has now swelled to a chorus that cannot be ignored, that will not be deterred, that will ring out across this land as a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, make this time different than all the rest.” (I’d urge you to take a look at this  campaign video and see if you miss the reference to America having gone a “little soft.”)

Let’s see if we can make sense of this, shall we?

When Obama was extremely popular, a kind of celebrity-politician, the American people were lavished with praise, presumably for our profound insight and wisdom when it came to choosing our political leaders. …

Byron York says Clinton has found a subtle way to trash the man who beat his wife. “I made lots of jobs and you haven’t.”

While the political world obsesses over Chris Christie, Rick Perry and the rest of the Republican presidential field, something is up with Bill Clinton. On Nov. 8, the former president will publish a new book entitled “Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy.” Judging by pre-release publicity, the book resembles nothing so much as a campaign tract for a third Clinton term. Of course Clinton is barred by the Constitution from being elected president again, but “Back to Work” still seems the product of an author who’s gearing up for something.

The book’s publicity materials say Clinton will offer “specific recommendations” and will propose “how we can get out of the current economic crisis and lay a foundation for long-term prosperity.” The former president will argue that political warfare in Washington “has produced bad policies, giving us a weak economy with few jobs, growing income inequality and poverty, and a decline in our competitive position.”

A new book on anti-Semitism is reviewed by the Claremont Institute. 

“In all its myriad manifestations,” says the British historian Paul Johnson, “the language of anti-Semitism through the ages is a dictionary of non-sequiturs and antonyms.” Jews, as the embodiment of whatever the anti-Semite fears, are by turns money-grubbing misers, or crass, showy spenders; fancy Rothschilds or vulgar peddlers. They are unassimilable aliens, secretive and hermetic, or else they are chameleons who assimilate themselves all too well into their host cultures.

Anti-Semitism has also proven itself a surpassingly expedient political fantasy, equally instrumental to Left and Right. Depending on the ax being ground, Jews have been seen as revolutionaries, enemies of the status quo, or as imperialist preservers of the status quo. They were greedy bankers, rapacious loan-mongers, exploiters of workers, and profit-loving capitalists; or they were subversive socialists. In Russia “the Jews” were blamed for capitalism in the 19th century and for Communism in the early 20th. In the 21st, to come full circle, Jewish capitalist oligarchs are often blamed for the Soviet collapse.

But in the capable hands of Robert S. Wistrich, a professor of modern European history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the history of such nonsense becomes scholarship. An expert pathologist, Wistrich traces in his latest book the most virulent strains of the anti-Semitic disease, and diagnoses its symptomatic expressions in Christianity, Nazism, and Islamism. …

Andrew Malcolm has moved to Investor’s Business Daily; including late-night humor.

Letterman: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie keeps saying he’s not running for president. However, he is willing to consider running for Santa.

Conan: Depressing news over Hallmark’s new line of recession-themed greeting cards — “Sorry you lost your job.” They’re printed in China.