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James Pethokoukis posts on today’s central bank actions.

What just happened?

The world’s major central banks acted jointly on Wednesday to provide cheaper dollar liquidity to starved European banks facing a credit crunch as the euro zone’s sovereign debt crisis threatened to bring financial disaster. The surprise emergency move by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the central banks of Britain, Canada and Switzerland recalled coordinated action to steady global markets in the 2008 financial crisis. (via Reuters)

The move makes clear that regulators increasingly are concerned about the strain that the European debt crisis is placing on financial companies, which are facing increasing difficulty in borrowing through normal channels the money that they need to fund their operations and obligations. (via the NYTimes) …

Caroline Glick writes on our withdrawal from Iraq.

Next month, America’s long campaign in Iraq will come to an end with the departure of the last US forces from the country.

Amazingly, the approaching withdrawal date has fomented little discussion in the US. Few have weighed in on the likely consequences of President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw on the US’s hard won gains in that country.

After some six thousand Americans gave their lives in the struggle for Iraq and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on the war, it is quite amazing that its conclusion is being met with disinterested yawns.

The general stupor was broken last week with The Weekly Standard’s publication of an article titled, “Defeat in Iraq: President Obama’s decision to withdraw US troops is the mother of all disasters.”

The article was written by Frederick and Kimberly Kagan and Marisa Cochrane Sullivan.

The Kagans contributed to conceptualizing the US’s successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, popularly known as “the surge,” that president George W. Bush implemented in 2007.

In their article, the Kagans and Sullivan explain the strategic implications of next month’s withdrawal. …

… The lion’s share of responsibility for this dismal state of affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left didn’t want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after September 11, the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to identify the enemy, Bush adopted war-fighting tactics that discredited the war effort and demoralized and divided the American public, thus paving the way for Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and appeasement.

Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left’s ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America’s worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey’s Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.

And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat from Iraq, and pro- American forces in the region and the US itself will reap the whirlwind of Washington’s irresponsibility.

There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.

Toby Harnden says the president’s dovish tone has caused problems.

Sitting in a bland conference room one evening last week, a focus group of seven Republican-leaning suburban voters from the crucial swing state of Virginia mused about America’s foreign policy in the light of the 2012 election.

A group of us were in a a darkened room next door observing through a one-way mirror. The candidate preferences of the seven broadly reflected national polls: two gung-ho for Newt Gingrich, two undecided and three for Mitt Romney, though none of them especially enthusiastic about it.

It was no shocker that they were down on President Barack Obama. What was surprising, though, was that all seven thought he was bringing troops back from Iraq and Afghanistan precipitately.

More broadly, there was a consensus that their president was ineffectual. “Obama is giving things away,” said a man who works as a mortgage broker and coaches Little League baseball. “If say we’ll be out of X county by Y date you’ve already weakened your bargaining power because they don’t know if you have will to fight.”

An Asian-American man, who was the best-versed on politics, said: “The President wants to be amiable but that doesn’t work in foreign policy. We’re not conveying strength we have.” What Americans were looking for, he ventured, was a switch “in tone” to “someone seeming to stand up for country, rallying for country, fighting for the country – whereas Obama’s trying to everyone as equals, trying to be fair”.

How can it be that a US commander-in-chief who ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden, has increased drone strikes in Pakistan sevenfold, arranged for Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, to be taken out in Yemen and protected the American homeland from terrorist attack for three years is seen as weak? …

Forbes’ Sally Pipes welcomes Wal-Mart’s health care clinics.

Earlier this month, Wal-Mart dropped a bombshell on the health care industry. A memo from the retail giant obtained by National Public Radio revealed that the company would seek partners to help it “dramatically . . . lower the cost of health care . . . by becoming the largest provider of primary health care services in the nation.”

That’s great news for American consumers. Retail health clinics like those operated by Wal-Mart and its peers represent crucial components of our nation’s drive to expand access to affordable health care.

Wal-Mart already operates about 140 retail clinics. Nationwide, there are now more than 1,000 such clinics, where consumers can get a variety of treatments for common ailments like colds or ear infections for less than the cost of a visit to the doctor’s office.

Not everyone supports the rapid expansion of retail clinics. Some doctors, for instance, question whether the nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants that treat most patients at the clinics are equipped with the proper tools and skills to deliver high-quality care.

Their fears are generally unfounded. Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and RAND Institute researcher, examined the comparative quality of treatment at retail clinics in a 2009 study for Annals of Internal Medicine.

The results? …

WSJ Editors say goodbye Barney.

… Few House Members have made a bigger legislative mark, and arguably no one so expensively. Mr. Frank deserves to be forever remembered—and we’ll help everyone remember him—as the nation’s leading protector of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before their fall. For years Barney helped block meaningful reform of the mortgage giants while pushing an “affordable housing” agenda that helped to enlarge the subprime mortgage industry.

“I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision],” Mr. Frank said on September 25, 2003, in one of his many legendary rhetorical hits. “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.” The dice came up snake-eyes for the housing market and U.S. economy. …

Michael Graham is less polite. 

Two generations ago, Will Rogers noted that the problem with Congress was that, when they told a joke, it became a law; and when they passed a law, it was a joke. And one of America’s biggest — and most expensive — political jokes has finally gotten to the punchline:

Barney Frank is leaving office at the end of his term. Maybe he just wants to spend more quality time with his pot-growing prostitute friends in the sub-prime lending business.

I apologize for the mean-spiritedness of that last comment. It’s particularly mean-spirited because it’s demonstrably true.

A sitting congressman re-elected after his boyfriend is busted for running a male prostitution ring out of the congressman’s condo? Amazing. Re-elected after it’s discovered another boyfriend helps run a major money-losing government agency “regulated” by the congressman’s committee? Astounding. But after a third boyfriend is busted for growing pot while you’re sitting on his front porch?

Words fail. Then again, so did the voters who kept this joke going. …

Late Night with Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: Some bad news. You have probably heard that the congressional Supercommmitee failed to solve the national deficit problem with $1.2 trillion in savings. The best idea the members could come up with was a bake sale.

Fallon: Well, President Obama is back now from another bunch of his trips. The last one he was in Asia where he got to see all kinds of stuff that he never sees at home, like jobs.

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Heather Mac Donald says the Occupy folks should protest against one of the real campus calamities – the diversity pukes that populate American academia.

As protesters festively (oops! I mean “heroically”) rally on college quads across California in the wake of the gratuitous macing of a dozen Occupy Wall Street wannabes at University of California–Davis last Friday, UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion declared that the rising tuition at California’s public universities is giving him “heartburn.” It should, since Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri and his fellow diversity bureaucrats are a large cause of those skyrocketing college fees, not just in California but nationally.

It is to be expected that students will be immaculately ignorant of the matters they protest, but it takes a special type of gall for a bureaucrat such as Basri to shed crocodile tears over California’s tuition increases, which had been a seeming target of OWS-inspired protest before the brutish UC Davis pepper-spray incident provided a more mediagenic reason to cut classes. OWS-ers are theatrically calling for a general strike of the University of California for this coming Monday.

Basri commands a staff of 17, allegedly all required to make sure that fanatically left-wing UC Berkeley is sufficiently attuned to the values of “diversity” and “inclusion”; his 2009 base pay of $194,000 was nearly four times that of starting assistant professors. Basri was given responsibility for a $4.5 million slice of Berkeley’s vast diversity bureaucracy when he became the school’s first Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion in 2007; since then, the programs under his control have undoubtedly weathered the recession far more comfortably than mere academic endeavors.

UC Berkeley’s diversity apparatus, which spreads far beyond the office of the VC for E and I, is utterly typical. For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally. UC Davis, for example, whose modest OWS movement has been happily energized by the conceit that the campus is a police state, offers the usual menu of diversity effluvia under the auspices of an Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations. A flow chart of Linnaean complexity would be needed to accurately map all the activities overseen by the AEVC for CCR. They include a Diversity Trainers Institute, staffed by Davis’s Administrator of Diversity Education; the Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; the Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; the Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; an Education Specialist with the UC Davis Sexual Harassment Education Program; an Academic Enrichment Coordinator with the UC Davis Department of Academic Preparation Programs; and the Diversity Program Coordinator and Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator with the Office of Campus Community Relations. The Diversity Trainers Institute recruits “a cadre of individuals who will serve as diversity trainers/educators,” a function that would seem largely superfluous, given that the Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations already offers a Diversity Education Series that grants Understanding Diversity Certificates in “Unpacking Oppression” and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social Justice.” …

And Debra Saunders says the OWS group should hope they’re not treated like those opposed to abortion. 

For all their whining about the “police state” and the city’s failure to respect their “First Amendment rights,” Occupy Oakland activists have managed to flout the law with regular impunity. Somehow demonstrators have managed to turn Frank Ogawa Plaza into a tent stew and shut down parts of the city in a so-called general strike Nov. 2, and still they think they’re victims who have been deprived of their free speech rights.

But if they want to see what it’s really like to fight City Hall, they should talk to Walter Hoye. Hoye’s offense was to walk up to people with a sign that said, “Jesus loves you and your baby. Let us help.” For that he was arrested twice in 2008 and sentenced to 30 days in jail.

The difference here is that Hoye wasn’t peddling some amorphous grievances that might be addressed with higher taxes and more government. Hoye’s sin – pardon the expression – is that he opposed abortion. …

Janet Daley writing in The Telegraph, UK, has advice for British pols – “Want to fix things in the economy, try doing less.”

… Instead of finding new, ingenious ways to use your money that might give a brief appearance of nibbling at the edges of problems such as unemployment and property prices, the state needs to withdraw from hyperactive job-creation and mortgage-lending, and become much more vigilant in ensuring competition in the productive parts of the economy. The deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s would be coming in for much less criticism now if it had not funked the matter of competitiveness: nationalised industries too often gave way to private monopolies and cartels. If people are taxed less and fleeced less, they will be happy to stimulate the economy in the good old-fashioned way.

As David Cameron used to say before he took fright: we need a smaller state that does less and spends less. Mr Osborne used to say that, too, in terms that were at least as stark as any Tory backbencher. Maybe a generation of Treasury officials who came of age under the Brown Terror got to him with the electrodes. Or else, his role as election campaign manager for the Conservatives is conflicting with what should be his better judgment as head of the nation’s finances. After all, it should be his function as Chancellor to tell his party’s political strategist that voter-appeasing initiatives are unaffordable, and that economic reality must take precedence. Presumably, Mr Osborne would have had to carry on that argument with himself. (If he did, we know which side won.)

There is an urgent need now to rethink the whole relationship between government and populace while there is still the possibility of discussion. In Britain, Europe and America, the questions are remarkably similar. Can a free-market economy support an infinitely growing state? We will have to choose, quite soon, between liberty and the “security” of a society in which government controls the levers of economic life. Washington politicians are getting a terrible drubbing for failing to resolve their implacable differences over the size of the state (to the extent that they are unable to agree a federal budget). The US national debate may seem rough and ready to European ears – but at least they are engaging in the real argument.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the Gingrich balloon.

Many conservatives who know better have constructed an odd justification in the 2012 presidential primary for supporting the man who makes Bill Clinton look like a model of impulse control. It goes like this: Newt Gingrich did a magnificent job getting the GOP back into the House majority and defeating HillaryCare 17 years ago. His acerbic wit and mental dexterity would make for a hugely entertaining debate with President Obama. Therefore, he should be our nominee.

This is silliness on stilts. The American people — the ones who will vote in the general election — don’t give a darn about 1994. Moreover, the huge ideological inconsistencies, the character flaws and the ever-present danger of self-immolation make Gingrich probably the worst possible nominee to go up against the search-and-destroy Obama reelection campaign. And should he, by some miracle, get to the Oval Office, do we really imagine the presidency would be any different than his speakership (disorganized, frenetic, disloyal to conservatives, gaffe-prone and all about HIM)? …

Ann Coulter has Gingrich memories too. She closes by endorsing Romney.

So now, apparently, we have to go through the cycle of the media pushing Newt Gingrich. This is going to be fantastic.

In addition to having an affair in the middle of Clinton’s impeachment; apologizing to Jesse Jackson on behalf of J.C. Watts – one of two black Republicans then in Congress –- for having criticized “poverty pimps,” and then inviting Jackson to a State of the Union address; cutting a global warming commercial with Nancy Pelosi; supporting George Soros’ candidate Dede Scozzafava in a congressional special election; appearing in public with the Rev. Al Sharpton to promote nonspecific education reform; and calling Paul Ryan’s plan to save Social Security “right-wing social engineering,” we found out this week that Gingrich was a recipient of Freddie Mac political money. … 

… Although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the institutions most responsible for the nation’s current financial crisis — were almost entirely Democratic cash cows, they managed to dirty up enough Republicans to make it seem like bipartisan corruption.

Democrats sucked hundreds of millions of dollars out of these institutions: Franklin Raines, $90 million; Jamie Gorelick, $26.4 million; Jim Johnson, $20 million.

By contrast, Republicans came cheap. For the amazingly good price of only $300,000 apiece, Fannie and Freddie bought the good will of former Reps. Vin Weber, R-Minn., Susan Molinari, R-N.Y., and Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.* Former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y., was even cheaper at $240,000.

[*Correction: After Gingrich admitted last week to receiving $300,000 from Freddie, we found out this week that it was actually closer to $1.6 million.] …

… Instead of sitting on our thumbs, wishing Ronald Reagan were around, or chasing the latest mechanical rabbit flashed by the media, conservatives ought to start rallying around Romney as the only Republican who has a shot at beating Obama. We’ll attack him when he’s president.

It’s fun to be a purist, but let’s put that on hold until Obama and his abominable health care plan are gone, please.

Kimberley Strassel gives us the back story on the government gripes against Gibson Guitar. 

On a sweltering day in August, federal agents raided the Tennessee factories of the storied Gibson Guitar Corp. The suggestion was that Gibson had violated the Lacey Act—a federal law designed to protect wildlife—by importing certain India ebony. The company has vehemently denied that suggestion and has yet to be charged. It is instead living in a state of harassed legal limbo.

Which, let’s be clear, is exactly what its persecutors had planned all along. The untold story of Gibson is this: It was set up.

Most of the press coverage has implied that the company is the unfortunate victim of a well-meaning, if complicated, law. Stories note, in passing, that the Lacey Act was “expanded” in 2008, and that this has had “unintended consequences.” Given Washington’s reputation for ill-considered bills, this might make sense.

Only not in this case. The story here is about how a toxic alliance of ideological activists and trade protectionists deliberately set about creating a vague law, one designed to make an example out of companies (like Gibson) and thus chill imports—even legal ones. …

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Jeff Jacoby remembers Thanksgiving assembly at the Hebrew Academy in Cleveland.

… The key to what Peter Salins, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, calls “assimilation, American style’’ was a balancing act. On the one hand, newcomers to the United States found out quickly that they were expected to become honest-to-God Americans. That meant learning English, getting a job, embracing America’s democratic values and institutions, and eventually taking the oath as new citizens.

On the other hand, immigrants weren’t obliged to shed their ethnic pride, or to drop the foods and customs and festivals they brought with them from their native land. They were free to be “as ethnic as they pleased,’’ writes Salins. The goal of assimilation was not to make all Americans alike; it was to get newcomers, however dissimilar their backgrounds and cultures, to believe that they were “irrevocably part of the same national family.’’

There was one other key ingredient, which we too easily overlook. Immigrants understood that the country they had come to was in some indispensable way better than the one they had left. They might retain a soft spot for the scenery or clothing or rhythms of life in the Old Country, they might always prefer their mother tongue to English, they might even pay tuition at a private or parochial school so that the religious or linguistic values they had grown up with would be passed on to their kids. But underlying everything would be the awareness that they had chosen to be Americans.

America was better than their native land — perhaps because its rulers were corrupt, or because it was riven by war, or because economic opportunities were limited. Perhaps, as in my father’s case, because totalitarian tyrants — first Nazis, then Communists — had made life there a hell on earth. Perhaps because, like the Pilgrims, they sought a peaceable society where they could worship as they saw fit without being “hunted and persecuted on every side.’’

As my fellow forth-graders and I belted out the lyrics to another song — P-I-L-grim fathers landed here on Plymouth Bay — we assumed that Mrs. Feigenbaum was simply getting us ready for the Thanksgiving assembly. She knew, of course, that she was doing something far more important. She was getting us ready to be Americans.

All the assimilated Americans have actually, according to Mark Steyn, come to this;

… In return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling (and, by the way, that’s the wrong way of looking at it: more accurately, we’re lowering the debt abyss), John Boehner bragged that he’d got a deal for “a real, enforceable cut” of supposedly $7 billion from fiscal year 2012. After running the numbers themselves, the Congressional Budget Office said it only cut $1 billion from FY 2012.

Which of these numbers is accurate?

The correct answer is: Who cares? The government of the United States currently spends $188 million it doesn’t have every hour of every day. So, if it’s $1 billion in “real, enforceable cuts,” in the time it takes to roast a 20-pound stuffed turkey for your Thanksgiving dinner, the government’s already borrowed back all those painstakingly negotiated savings. If it’s $7 billion in “real, enforceable cuts,” in the time it takes you to defrost the bird, the cuts have all been borrowed back.

Bonus question: How “real” and “enforceable” are all those real, enforceable cuts? By the time the relevant bill passed the Senate earlier this month, the 2012 austerity budget with its brutal, savage cuts to government services actually increased spending by $10 billion. More, more, more, how do you like it?

But don’t worry. Aside from spending the summer negotiating a deal that increases runaway federal spending, those stingy, cheeseparing Republicans also forced the Democrats to agree to create that big ol’ supercommittee that would save $1.2 trillion — over the course of 10 years.

Anywhere else on the planet that would be a significant chunk of change. But the government of the United States is planning to spend $44 trillion in the next decade. So $1.2 trillion is about 2.7 percent. Any businessman could cut 2.7 percent from his budget in his sleep. But not congressional supercommittees of supermen with superpowers thrashing it out across the table for three months. So there will be no 2.7 percent cut. …

Charles Moore in the Telegraph, UK says there is some to dislike and some to like in the movie about Margaret Thatcher.

Friends of Lady Thatcher tend to deplore The Iron Lady, the new film about her starring Meryl Streep. They do so because they are upset at the portrayal of a still living person as suffering from dementia. Their feelings do them credit as friends. As someone who knows her himself, I find bits of the film, which I have just seen, distressing.

But friends are often the last people to understand how things look in a wider setting. When the general public (who, for some reason, will not be allowed to see the film until January) walk into the cinema and watch the Streep version of Thatcher, I am convinced that they will be moved by the human story. They will also absorb a most powerful piece of propaganda for conservatism (though not necessarily Conservatism). One reason it is so powerful is that it feels uncalculated: it just arises, inescapably, from the tale it tells. And its lessons apply, pointedly, to the current state of the Western world.

The message, embodied in the personality of the extraordinary woman depicted, is that conservatism is a sort of insurrection. We all know the romance of slave revolts. People wrote great poems about them. Wordsworth, for example, celebrated the oddly named Toussaint L’Ouverture, who turned his fellow slaves against their masters in Haiti. But there is romance, too, in the revolt of the bourgeoisie. The Iron Lady is a sort of poem about the triumph and tragedy of its leader, Margaret L’Epicière. …

Christopher Caldwell on the rout of the Spanish socialists.

Just as incoming American presidents are given the atomic “briefcase” by their predecessors, along with the codes for launching a nuclear attack, perhaps Spanish prime ministers will henceforth receive a begging cup and a German phrasebook. It was al Qaeda that made José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of the Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) Spain’s prime minister; Lehman Brothers and the euro crisis have unmade him, putting his country at the financial mercy of its European neighbors. Zapatero came to power when jihadists bombed several trains in the heart of Madrid on election weekend 2004. The bombs convinced Spaniards they would be safer voting for the candidate more congenial to al Qaeda’s reading of the Iraq war. 

This week prime minister-elect Mariano Rajoy, leader of the conservative Popular party, put an end to seven years of Zapaterismo. …

Ilya Somin in Volokh Conspiracy posts on the perverse police incentives of the drug war.

Radley Balko has an interesting piece at Huffington Post on the ways in which the War on Drugs creates perverse incentives for police departments:

“Arresting people for assaults, beatings and robberies doesn’t bring money back to police departments, but drug cases do in a couple of ways. First, police departments across the country compete for a pool of federal anti-drug grants. The more arrests and drug seizures a department can claim, the stronger its application for those grants.

“The availability of huge federal anti-drug grants incentivizes departments to pay for SWAT team armor and weapons, and leads our police officers to abandon real crime victims in our communities in favor of ratcheting up their drug arrest stats,” said former Los Angeles Deputy Chief of Police Stephen Downing. Downing is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an advocacy group of cops and prosecutors who are calling for an end to the drug war.

“When our cops are focused on executing large-scale, constitutionally questionable raids at the slightest hint that a small-time pot dealer is at work, real police work preventing and investigating crimes like robberies and rapes falls by the wayside,” Downing said.

And this problem is on the rise all over the country. Last year, police in New York City arrested around 50,000 people for marijuana possession. Pot has been decriminalized in New York since 1977, but displaying the drug in public is still a crime. So police officers stop people who look “suspicious,” frisk them, ask them to empty their pockets, then arrest them if they pull out a joint or a small amount of marijuana. They’re tricked into breaking the law. According to a report from Queens College sociologist Harry Levine, there were 33,775 such arrests from 1981 to 1995. Between 1996 and 2010 there were 536,322.”

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Charles Krauthammer knows who was the super failure.

… Has the president ever publicly proposed a single significant structural change in any entitlement? After Simpson-Bowles reported? No. In his February budget? No. In his April 13 budget “framework”? No. During the debt-ceiling crisis? No. During or after the supercommittee deliberations? No.

Indeed, Obama was AWOL from the supercommittee — then immediately pounced on its failure by going on TV to repeat his incessantly repeated campaign theme of the do-nothing (Republican) Congress.

A swell slogan that fits nicely with the Norquist myth. Except for another inconvenient fact: It is the Republicans who passed — through the House, the only branch of government they control — a real budget that cut $5.8 trillion of spending over the next 10 years. Obama’s February budget, which would have increased spending, was laughed out of the Senate, voted down 97 to 0. As for the Democratic Senate, it has submitted no budget at all for 2?1 / 2 years.

Who, then, is do-nothing? Republicans should happily take on this absurd, and central, Democratic campaign plank. Bring Simpson-Bowles to the House floor and pass the most radical of its three deficit-reduction alternatives.

Dare the Senate Democrats to vote down the grandest of all bargains. Dare Obama to veto his own debt commission. Dare the Democrats to actually do something about debt.

Investors editors say the CBO admits the stimulus was a bust.

After nearly all the stimulus money has been spent, the Congressional Budget Office now admits it cost more than advertised, did less to boost growth and will hurt the economy in the long run.

In its latest quarterly report on the economic effects of the Obama stimulus, the CBO sharply lowered its “worst case” scenario while trimming many of its upper-bound estimates for stimulus-fueled growth and employment.

The new report finds, for example, that the stimulus may have added as little as 0.7% to GDP growth in 2010 — when spending was at its peak — and created as few as 700,000 new jobs.

Both are down significantly from the CBO’s previous worst-case scenario. …

When asked to pick which economy will blow up first, Peter Schiff thinks the super failure points to us. 

With fiscal time bombs ticking in both Europe and the United States, the pertinent question for now seems to be which will explode first. For much of the past few months it looked as if Europe was set to blow. But Angela Merkel’s refusal to support a Federal Reserve style bailout of European sovereigns and her recent statement the she had no Hank Paulson style fiscal bazooka in her handbag, has lowered the heat. In contrast, the utter failure of the Congressional Super Committee in the United States to come up with any shred of success in addressing America’s fiscal problems has sparked a renewed realization that America’s fuse is dangerously short. 

Chancellor Merkel has been emphatic that European politicians not be given a monetary crutch similar to the one relied on by their American counterparts. Her laudable goal, much derided on the editorial pages of the New York Times, is to defuse Europe’s debt bomb with substantive budget reforms, and as a result to make the euro “the strongest currency in the world.” Much has been made of the poorly received auction today of German Government bonds, with some saying the lack of demand (which pushed yields on 10-year German Bonds past 2% –hardly indicative of panic selling) is evidence of investor unease with Merkel’s economic policies. I would argue the opposite: that many investors still think that Merkel is bluffing and that eventually Germany will print and stimulate like everyone else. It is likely for this reason that yields on German debt have increased modestly.

In contrast, the U.S. is crystal clear in its intention to ignore its debt problems. With the failure of the Super Committee this week it actually became official. American politicians will not, under any circumstances willingly confront our underlying debt crisis. …

David Harsanyi on the super committee.

H.L. Mencken famously wrote that every decent man is ashamed of his government. This one gives you little choice.

Gridlock is ordinarily the most constructive and moral form of government, but with entitlement programs on autopilot self-destruct, we’re in trouble. So Americans turned their weary eyes toward a dream team, a supercommittee, a 12-member panel of our brightest lights, charged with identifying a measly $1.2 trillion in deficit savings over 10 years. Save us. …

A couple of Corner posts on Gingrich smarts. Here’s Mark Steyn.

In all the Newt immigration stuff, this seems to have gone overlooked:

“Newt is for a local, community review board where local citizens can decide whether or not their neighbors that have come here illegally should find a path to legality, not citizenship,” [Gingrich spokesperson R C Hammond] said. “Two distinctly different things.”

He said it would operate like a World War II draft board. But I asked him whether it would be a problem for local communities to determine legality given that this issue would concern federal law.

“None of this matters until you secure the border,” he said.

I asked him again, though, about how local communities could determine federal law.

“That’s why it’s called reform,” he said.

So the North Podunk Town Meeting could vote to deny you your Green Card but ten miles down the road the burghers of South Podunk could vote to give one to your cousin? That sure sounds like a plan.

It’s a tribute to Mitt Romney’s soporific caution and Herman Cain’s blithe indifference to the bit on the map marked Rest of the World that Newt is now what passes for the GOP’s deep thinker.

Conrad Black will turn your Nixon thoughts on their heads.

… Richard Nixon was the first president since Gen. Zachary Taylor in 1848 to be elected to office without his party being in control of either house of the Congress. Despite the fact that the Democrats had plunged the country into Vietnam without any proper authorization, mismanaged the war, and lost control of domestic opinion, they, with the eager complicity of the national media, abandoned their former leaders and became anti-war agitators, and the entire Democratic establishment except Scoop Jackson set out to inflict defeat on the U.S. while Nixon and Kissinger worked with great skill and often courage to extract America from the war while salvaging a non-Communist government in South Vietnam, in obvious conformity with the wishes of most of the people of South Vietnam.

The Democrats failed to prevent Nixon and Kissinger from negotiating out of the Democrats’ war after South Vietnam successfully repulsed the Communists on the ground on their own in April and May 1972. They did this with no American ground support, though with heavy American air support, and after Nixon and Kissinger, with surpassing diplomatic agility, had recruited China and Russia to help pressure North Vietnam into a settlement. After having thus failed to prosecute the war they started, or to force an outright surrender from the succeeding Republican administration, the Democrats and their partisans in the national media approved the administration’s Vietnam peace treaty in the Senate (which was a formality Nixon did not have to seek), in which treaty it was implicit that anticipated North Vietnamese violations would be replied to with U.S. air power as they had been in 1972.

When the North Vietnamese assault came, the Democrats prevented the Nixon and Ford administrations from providing the South Vietnamese any assistance, dooming the mission for which 57,000 Americans had died. This outright betrayal of the South Vietnamese anti-Communists, which condemned millions to gruesome fates in the Cambodian killing fields and among the Boat People on the high seas, and to the insatiable execution squads of the Viet Cong, was covered by, in Napoleon’s phrase, the “lies agreed upon” that Nixon and Kissinger had known all along that a non-Communist Vietnam had no chance of survival and had deliberately sacrificed tens of thousands of American servicemen in order to masquerade as patriots and true-grit Cold Warriors. This was not just a shameful traduction; it was an egregious act of partisan transvestism.

In his one full presidential term, in addition to extracting America undefeated from Vietnam and opening relations with China, Richard Nixon negotiated and signed the greatest arms-control agreement in the history of the world with the Soviet Union, started the peace process in the Middle East, abolished the draft that had so vexed the hordes of supposedly conscientious anti-war demonstrators, ended school segregation while avoiding the court-ordered lunacy of compulsory busing of children all around metropolitan areas in pursuit of “racial balance,” and founded the Environmental Protection Agency.

For all of these reasons, Nixon was reelected in 1972 by the greatest majority of the states (49) since James Monroe ran unopposed in 1820, and by the greatest plurality in history (18 million). …

Andrew Malcolm with late-night humor.

Fallon: PETA released a new Thanksgiving ad aimed at children. It compares eating turkeys to eating their pet dogs. Or as kids in China put it, ‘So?’”

Conan: Occupy Wall Street protesters planned to Occupy the Subway. Because if there’s one place to confront the nation’s wealthy 1%, it’s on the New York City subway.

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Thomas Sowell on Alice in Liberal Land.

“Alice in Wonderland” was written by a professor who also wrote a book on symbolic logic. So it is not surprising that Alice encountered not only strange behavior in Wonderland, but also strange and illogical reasoning — of a sort too often found in the real world, and which a logician would be very much aware of.

If Alice could visit the world of liberal rhetoric and assumptions today, she might find similarly illogical and bizarre thinking. But people suffering in the current economy might not find it nearly as entertaining as “Alice in Wonderland.”

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the world envisioned by today’s liberals is that it is a world where other people just passively accept whatever “change” liberals impose. In the world of Liberal Land, you can just take for granted all the benefits of the existing society, and then simply tack on your new, wonderful ideas that will make things better.

For example, if the economy is going along well and you happen to take a notion that there ought to be more home ownership, especially among the poor and minorities, then you simply have the government decree that lenders have to lend to more low-income people and minorities who want mortgages, ending finicky mortgage standards about down payments, income and credit histories.

That sounds like a fine idea in the world of Liberal Land. Unfortunately, in the ugly world of reality, it turned out to be a financial disaster, from which the economy has still not yet recovered. Nor have the poor and minorities. …

Peter Ferrara says there is no excuse for Obamanomics. 

The history of America’s recessions is provided at the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).  Before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.  Yet here we are 47 months after the last recession started, and we still have no real recovery.

Instead, unemployment has been stuck at 9% or above for the longest period since the Great Depression.  Unemployment for blacks has remained over 15% for over 2 years, with Hispanic unemployment stuck well into double digits over that time as well.  Teenage unemployment has persisted at nearly 25%, with black teenage unemployment still nearly 40%.

The U6 unemployment rate, reflecting all of the unemployed still wanting work and the underemployed who can’t get full time work, is still 16.2%.  That includes an army of the unemployed or underemployed of over 26 million Americans.  And that still doesn’t fully count the millions of Americans who have given up and dropped out of the work force altogether.

On September 13 came the Census Bureau report fleshing out the full meaning of no economic recovery under Obama.  Median family income has fallen all the way back to 1996 levels.  The Wall Street Journal further reported on September 14, “Earnings of the typical man who works full time year round fell, and are lower—adjusted for inflation—than in 1978.”

The poverty rate climbed to 15.1%, higher than in the late 1960s when the War on Poverty was getting underway, $16 trillion ago.  The child poverty rate climbed to 22%, nearly a quarter of all American children.  The total number of Americans in poverty is higher than at any time in the over 50 years that the Census Bureau has been tallying it.  Moreover, the number of Americans ages 25-34 living with their parents has soared by 25%.

Yes, I know NBER declared the recession technically over in June, 2009, still the longest recession on record since the Depression.  But the point is next month will be 4 years since the recession started, and there is still no sustained real recovery.  Or as economist John Lott has emphasized, Obamanomics has produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression. …

Victor Davis Hanson calls it economic quackery.

Sometimes the wrong medicine can make a struggling patient far sicker than he would have been had he been allowed to recover naturally. Western medicine began with the premise that the physician either must know how to cure the patient or simply leave him alone — but above all not make him worse through harmful treatment.

As 2011 ends, we have discovered how to turn a natural recovery from a near-record recession into a serial slowdown. Almost every haphazard, ad hoc attempt by Barack Obama to jumpstart the economy has only further stalled it. The president has never articulated a diagnosis of why the economy was stalled, never outlined a coherent treatment plan, and so cannot offer a prognosis. If we have a sick budget, a Byzantine tax code, bankrupting entitlements and long-term debt burden, and a costly imported-oil bill, one would never know all that from the president, who has never offered any sort of plan for addressing these crises.

Borrowing over $4 trillion terrified investors and business owners — especially given campaign promises that Obama would not be so “unpatriotic” as to match in three years the debt that Bush had piled up in eight. After all, no one could accuse the Bush administration of having left the economy moribund by slashing government, running balanced or surplus budgets, reducing the national debt, and in tight-fisted fashion denying federal bailouts to reckless banks and Wall Street firms. Apparently, Barack Obama saw the Bush administration’s economic transgressions not as warnings, but as a green light to borrow and spend even more on a predetermined redistributive agenda (“Never let a crisis go to waste”) — as if once a Republican administration had trespassed, conservatives could hardly throw stones at even greater sinners. …

It’s not just the GOP that see he’s a loser, two Dem pollsters say it is time for Hillary.

When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality—and he must reach the same conclusion.

He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president’s accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor—one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president’s administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy.

Certainly, Mr. Obama could still win re-election in 2012. Even with his all-time low job approval ratings (and even worse ratings on handling the economy) the president could eke out a victory in November. But the kind of campaign required for the president’s political survival would make it almost impossible for him to govern—not only during the campaign, but throughout a second term. …

Since he feels free to weigh in on just about any topic, Peter Wehner wonders why Obama has nothing to say about Occupy violence.

I’m puzzled.

Given all of the violence, the lawlessness, the bigotry and the ugliness the Occupy Wall Street movement (and its off-spring) represent, why hasn’t the president spoken out –in a clear, forceful voice – against it?

It can’t be because he thinks it’s none of his business. This is a man, after all, who injected his thoughts on the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates and in the process accused the Cambridge police of acting “stupidly.” Obama has spoken out about the location of the Ground Zero mosque and the 2016 Olympic Games; the reaction of Republican audiences at GOP debates; and the Penn State child rape scandal. He’s suggested that racism is a driving force in the Tea Party movement. He gives sermons on civility in public discourse. And he’s made his picks for the NCAA Final Four on ESPN. Obama talks all the time, on llmost every issue under the sun. And yet when it comes to the actions of protesters at the various Occupy movements around America, he suddenly goes practically mute. …

Occupy returns the favor with a member asking for a moment of silence for the White House shooter. Wehner with the story.

Here is a clip, courtesy of The Daily Caller, in which  a protester from Occupy San Diego told his fellow protesters, “I think we should have a moment of silence in solidarity for the person they said was from the Washington, D.C. Occupy. Maybe, why did he feel the need to shoot the White House window today? So I think we should have a moment in solidarity for the White House, and for the guy that shot at the White House today. I don’t know if you heard, but someone shot at the White House window today.”

Can you imagine the round-the-clock (negative) media coverage if (a) a person from a Tea Party rally was arrested for shooting at the White House and (b) if a Tea Party member from another city had asked for a “moment of silence in solidarity” with the alleged shooter? It would produce days of front page, above-the-fold coverage in the New York Times? and spawn a thousand editorial and columns from liberals, to say nothing of providing MSNBC and CNN with several months worth of programming, hand-wringing, and sermonizing.

I persist in my belief that the media double standard as it relates to coverage of the Tea Party v. Occupy Wall Street (and its progeny) illustrates, in ways few other recent stories have, the widespread bias that exists in large sectors of the media. As I’ve argued before, many reporters and anchors undoubtedly believe they’re objective, detached, and applying a single standard to both movements, which in some respects makes the problem worse. The layers of delusion and self-delusion are astonishing.

Peter Wehner also laid out the unwatchable Mika Brzezinski in a Contentions post he later apologized for. But, it’s still fun.

If you want to see a revealing look at the emotional, and not simply political, investment liberals have in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, watch Mika Brzezinski and Jeffrey Sachs respond to Newt Gingrich’s comments over the weekend that the protesters should get a job and take a bath. Their rage is uncontained, almost tear-inducing, and comical. The whole crew and conversation, with one liberal egging on the other, is a fantastic window into the dominant mindset of modern-day liberal journalists.

One can see that without Joe Scarborough’s presence, the show is essentially the morning version of the shows hosted by Ed Schultz? and Rachel Maddow (though Maddow is a good deal more intelligent and informed than Brzezinski). Speaking of which: One of her colleagues would do Brzezinski a huge favor if they pulled her aside and explained to her the difference between “literal” and “figurative.” During this short segment Brzezinski claims Gingrich was “literally” standing on his “high horse” and his words “literally made my skin crawl.”

Actually, neither was “literally” true. There was no horse on the stage where Gingrich appeared, and Mika’s skin wasn’t crawling, at least from what we can tell. Then again, what would you expect from a woman who, in mocking Sarah Palin, named Abraham Lincoln as one of her favorite founders?

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Jennifer Rubin posts on the Energy Secretary’s defense of Solyndra loans.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s testimony yesterday wasn’t just bad news for him and the Obama administration. It is also an inconvenient reminder for Republican voters that some of the Tea Party-friendly candidates have rotten records when it comes to crony capitalism.

True, Chu’s testimony is most problematic for him and the president. He insisted the Solyndra endeavor was fully scrutinized. He had no idea others were playing politics. This exchange neatly summed up Chu’s cluelessness:

“I don’t see any chain of emails looking out for the taxpayer money,” Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., said in a tense exchange with Chu. “I see a whole lot of emails in the administration that are concerned about the politics. That’s what stinks the most about this.”

Chu denied that he asked Solyndra to delay the layoff announcement, prompting committee Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., to ask if Chu plans to look into who sent the email.

“You don’t know who in your department was involved with this and you have no idea in finding out?” Stearns asked.

Chu said the Energy Department’s general counsel “will look into who is doing these things.”

Chu is a walking advertisement for the perils of giving government bureaucrats duties for which they are not remotely competent to perform. When he says he acted with the taxpayers’ interests in mind, you get the idea that he might be serious. Apparently this crew thinks that the way to compete globally is to mimic failed command-and-control economies. …

Jennifer also says the Occupy group is getting inconvenient for the Dems.

The Occupy movement has officially become a liability for the Democrats. The New York Post reported: “Thousands of anti-Wall Street protesters clashed with cops [Thursday] across lower Manhattan, starting with a march on the New York Stock Exchange [in the] morning and ending with a crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge that snarled traffic.Cops responded in force, at one point [in the] afternoon sweeping into Zuccotti Park and arresting anyone inside. In total, at least 275 people were busted by cops; five of whom were charged with assault.”

And the New York Times opinion section is .?.?. well .?.?. entirely silent on the subject. Need we know any more about how the Occupy “movement” has become an unwanted bedfellow for the Democrats? …

And Jennifer posts on the $15 Trillion national debt.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is out with a new video explaining the implications of the $15 trillion debt we have now racked up:

Not surprisingly, the Republicans are having a field day with facts and figures to highlight their argument that President Obama has presided over a fiscal train wreck. Don Stewart, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s communications director, sent out a handy guide to the debt history:

$8.67 trillion: Democrats take control of Congress, January 2007

$10.62 trillion: President Obama’s Inaugural, January 20, 2009

$10.789 trillion: Stimulus bill signed into law, February 17, 2009

$12.351 trillion: President’s weekly address on the merits of “pay as you go,” February 13, 2010

$14.305 trillion: President’s weekly address where he said “I believe we can live within our means,” April 16, 2011 …

One more from Ms. Rubin as she introduces the subject for the balance of Pickings today – Newt Gingrich. She says he has a lot to do to rehabilitate himself.

Newt Gingrich is experiencing his first real scrutiny of the 2012 presidential primary. Jonathan Martin and John Harris observe, “Even allies say there is simply no way Gingrich can defend all the controversies of his past — there are simply too many of them. His task is to transcend them by seeking to set his past against a context of personal growth.”

That would work better, or course, if in his years after his speakership he hadn’t gorged at the trough of special-interest groups. That is why the Freddie Mac controversy is so difficult for him. As the Politico duo note: “Faced with more Freddie Mac questions on a campaign trip to Iowa Wednesday, Gingrich wouldn’t say whether the report was accurate that he got paid at least $1.6 million and, despite his previous claims, did not warn the organization about the looming housing bubble.” If he doesn’t have his story down yet on the first issue to confront him, it’ll be tough sledding.

And we’ve only begun to see the extent of Gingrich’s self-enrichment. …

In regards to Newt Gingrich, Toby Harnden asks if Americans want another know-it-all president.

… The New York Times has reported that Obama baulked when Tim Geithner, his Treasury Secretary, told him: “Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression.” Far from being overawed by the momentousness of his task, the new president shot back : “That’s not enough for me.”

In his book Confidence Men, Ron Suskind recounts that Mr Obama was frustrated by the mundanity of discussion about a trillion dollar economic stimulus. “There needs to be more inspiration here!” he said in one meeting. Later on, he raised the issue of smart grids. When he was told these were unfeasible as part of the stimulus, he responded: ‘We need more moon shot.”

Having remarked loftily during the campaign that Reagan had been a transformative president in a way that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton had not, Obama came into office making clear his desire to be a Reagan of the Left – as well as a reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt with perhaps a dash of John F. Kennedy thrown in.

When he had hired his campaign political director Patrick Gaspard in 2007, he had told him: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

A similar self-regard was on display from Gingrich (who, like Obama in 2008, has no executive experience) last week when he was asked why his campaign had struggled to gain traction in its early days. “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate and what I’m trying to do,” he replied. …

Andrew Ferguson took one for the team. He read all of Newt Gingrich’s books. He reports to us from the NY Times Magazine.

Let’s consult the literature — all 21 books by the self-proclaimed ideas man of politics. (Gingrich cites 23 books on his Web site. We are not counting the Contract With America or the coffee-table book “Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny.”)

When his top campaign staff abandoned him not long ago, Newt Gingrich didn’t seem terribly surprised. “Philosophically, I am very different from normal politicians,” he said. “We have big ideas.”

The “we,” as Gingrich uses it here, is akin to the royal we — it’s what might be called the professorial we, employed when the intellectual and the ideas he generates merge to create an entity too large for a singular personal pronoun. “Over my years in public life,” he writes in his latest book about how to save America, “I have become known as an ‘ideas man.’ ” And we shouldn’t doubt it. As I write, a stack of books tilts Pisa-like on my desk, each volume written by Gingrich and various co-authors. I got out my tape measure the other day and discovered that the stack is precisely 15¼ inches high — a figure that does not include the various revised and expanded editions that I have had Whispernetted into my Kindle, along with the historical novels that Gingrich has published with a co-writer named William R. Forstchen: three fat books on the Civil War, three on World War II and a pair on the Revolutionary War. If I added these to my stack, it would be taller than the mayor of Munchkinland and much heavier.

The books taken together are evidence of mental exertions unimaginable in any other contemporary politician. Professorial affectations are not high on the list of tactics candidates like to use in this age of galloping populism. Within the politico-journalistic combine, Gingrich’s status as an intellectual is accepted as an article of faith — something that everybody just assumes to be true, like man-made climate change or Barack Obama’s stratospheric I.Q. Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican, says Gingrich is “undoubtedly the smartest man I’ve ever met.” Cokie Roberts calls him “a big thinker.” Without irony the Democratic consultant Paul Begala praises his “intellectual heft” and Howard Dean his “intellectual leadership.” Ted Nugent says Gingrich is probably the “smartest guy out there.” So that settles that.

Or does it? I built my stack of Gingrich books because I intended to read every one of them, in chronological order, and I did read them, though my chronological scheme broke down eventually. Aside from the sheer number of words, what is most impressive about the Gingrich corpus is its range of literary form, from confessional to guidebook.

Gingrich’s first book, “Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future,” came out in 1984 and contained the seeds of much of what was to follow. Beneath its cover image — a flag-draped eagle inexplicably threatening the space shuttle — the backbencher Gingrich was identified as chairman of the Congressional Space Caucus, a position that inspired a series of “space cadet” jokes that took years to die. “Window of Opportunity” was co-written by Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, and a science-fiction writer called David Drake. Anyone who takes seriously the books that politicians claim to write must sooner or later confront the delicate matter of co-authors and ghostwriters, especially when the books serve, as in Gingrich’s case, as intellectual bona fides.

I have no inside knowledge of Gingrich’s work habits as a writer, or co-writer. In 1994, I was asked to help write one of his books, but the offer never went far enough to allow for close observation. There’s no reason to be prissy or censorious on the subject of politicians and their ghostwriters. George Washington had ghostwriters (pretty good ones, too: Hamilton and Madison). Lincoln had his secretaries write some letters for him, including, some historians say, the most famous Lincoln letter of them all, to the bereaved Mrs. Bixby. And despite a long parade of co-authors — historians, novelists, policy experts, journalists, even family members — Gingrich’s books show a remarkable consistency from one to the next. His contribution to the books that bear his name must be substantial — certainly greater than that of Charles Barkley, who once admitted he hadn’t read his autobiography. (No one else did, either.) Gingrich’s books are Gingrich’s books.

The ghosts for that first book served him unevenly. They got him in metaphor trouble from the first sentence. “We stand at a crossroads between two diverse futures,” he wrote. This crossroads, it transpired, faced an open window. That would be the window of vulnerability, which is widening. Three paragraphs later, the crossroads, perhaps swiveling on a Lazy Susan, is suddenly facing another window, also open. The important point, Gingrich writes, is that this window of opportunity is about to slam shut. And if it does? “We stand on the brink of a world of violence almost beyond our imagination.”

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Craig Pirrong juxtaposes Solyndra and Keystone.

… On the one hand: An unshakable commitment to throw vast sums of money extracted by coercion from American citizens at delusional, patently uneconomic projects that will produce little energy, and which just oh-so-coincidentally (It is a coincidence!  Really! Chu says so!) happen to be owned by Obama donors.

On the other hand: Using every regulatory power available to stymie the investment of private capital freely provided in economically viable projects that will produce large amounts of energy now and into the future, pursuant to highly speculative–and dubious–theories about the environmental impact of these projects.

The mental vacuum in which these environmental impacts are conceived is beyond belief. …

…In Federalist #70, Alexander Hamilton extolled “energy in the executive.”  In the past days we have seen an executive devoting all its energies, positive and negative, to pushing some projects that will produce no energy, and to thwarting others that will.   An energetic twofer: they will make us poorer, by making energy more expensive, and they will not help the environment–and will quite plausibly make the environment worse. …

Charles Krauthammer writes on pipeline politics.

… Obama’s decision was meant to appease his environmentalists. It’s already working. The president of the National Wildlife Federation told The Post (online edition, Nov. 10) that thousands of environmentalists who were galvanized to protest the pipeline would now support Obama in 2012. Moreover, a source told The Post, Obama campaign officials had concluded that “they do not pick up one vote from approving this project.”

Sure, the pipeline would have produced thousands of truly shovel-ready jobs. Sure, delay could forfeit to China a supremely important strategic asset — a nearby, highly reliable source of energy. But approval was calculated to be a political loss for the president. Easy choice.

It’s hard to think of a more clear-cut case of putting politics over nation. This from a president whose central campaign theme is that Republicans put party over nation, sacrificing country to crass political ends.

Nor is this the first time Obama’s election calendar trumped the national interest:

? Obama’s decision to wind down the Afghan surge in September 2012 is militarily inexplicable. It comes during the fighting season. It was recommended by none of his military commanders. It is explicable only as a talking point for the final days of his reelection campaign.

? At the height of the debt-ceiling debate last July, Obama pledged to veto any agreement that was not long-term. Definition of long term? By another amazing coincidence, any deal large enough to get him past Election Day (and thus avoid another such crisis next year). …

More on the misplaced pipeline priorities of this president from Daniel Henninger. 

The decision by the Obama administration to “delay” building the Keystone XL pipeline is a watershed moment in American politics. The implication of a policy choice rarely gets more stark than this. Put simply: Why should any blue-collar worker who isn’t hooked for life to a public budget vote for Barack Obama next year?

The Keystone XL pipeline would have created at least 20,000 direct and indirect jobs. Much of this would have been well-paid work for craftsmen, not jobs as hod carriers to repave the Interstate.

On a recent trip to Omaha, Neb., Mr. Obama signaled where his head was on the pipeline during a TV interview: “Folks in Nebraska, like folks all across the country, aren’t going to say to themselves, ‘We’re going to take a few thousand jobs if it means our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health.” Imagine if he’d been leading a wagon train of workers and farmers across the Western frontier in 1850.

Within days of the Keystone decision, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, said his country would divert sales of the Keystone-intended oil to Asia. Translation: Those lost American blue-collar pipeline jobs are disappearing into the Asian sun. Incidentally, Mr. Harper has said he wants to turn Canada into an energy “superpower,” exploiting its oil, gas and hydroelectric resources. Meanwhile, the American president shores up his environmental base in Hollywood and on campus. Perhaps our blue-collar work force should consider emigrating to Canada.

Recall as well the president’s gut reaction in 2010 to the BP Gulf oil spill: an order shutting down deep-water drilling in U.S. waters. The effect on blue-collar workers in that industry was devastating. …

Neal Boortz weighs in too.

Barack Obama has taken to micro-managing our economy by picking the winners and losers.  Not only has he chosen “green energy” but he has selected which companies within the industry will benefit from Obama’s piggy bank.  And it turns out that if you wanted a piece of the government’s green energy piggy bank, you would have better luck if you had … donated to Barack Obama’s campaign! 

A new list of green energy loans doled out by the Obama administration reveals that 80% of the $20.5 billion in energy department loans went to Obama’s top donors.  Don’t you think that this is just a bit strange?  This, my friends, is what you would call crony capitalism – using someone else’s money (the tax payers) to reward personal relationships (in this case, for political gain). …

It was two weeks ago when we ran a piece on LSU football. WSJ has another. This time on Brad Wing the improbable freshman punter from Australia who is on his way to becoming a college football legend.

Brad Wing is king of the campus at LSU.

Classmates wear T-shirts that allude to his “swag.” Posters of his infamous 44-yard run against Florida, during which he drew a penalty flag for spreading his arms like an airplane, adorn storefront windows. Just this week, he hit Facebook’s 5,000-friend limit and had no choice but to start his own “fan” page.

None of this should be terribly surprising. Wing, after all, plays football for the No. 1-ranked Tigers. But here’s the weird part: He’s the punter.

While LSU has emerged as the national-title favorite because of its merciless defense, Wing—a 20-year-old from Australia with an unorthodox style—has played an enormous role. He’s helped produce arguably the most staggering statistic in college football this season: LSU’s opponents have totaled a mere seven return yards on his 39 punts. In other words, against LSU, teams can expect to gain about six inches each time Wing boots a punt.

It isn’t sexy, but this is the sort of edge that can separate a national-title contender from an also-ran, particularly in the brutally tough Southeastern Conference, whose teams have won the last five national championships. Every elite SEC team recruits powerful linemen and athletic running backs and receivers. Punters? Not such a priority.

But when it comes to field position, no player has a greater impact—and more coaches appear to be coming to that realization. Wing is Exhibit A. …

Here’s more on Brad Wing from Sports Illustrated. “After all the buildup, Game of Century decided by … kickers.”

… After all that buildup and all that pounding, the two best defenses in the country nullified two decent offenses. In the end, a 5-foot-11, 183-pound walk-on kicker and an Australian punter decided a game contested — for the most part — by 300-pound men beating the stuffing out of one another. Alleman made three short kicks (19, 30 and 25 yards), while his Alabama counterparts, Cade Foster and Jeremy Shelley, failed to score on four of six kicks. One was blocked, and the average distance of the three misses was 48.7 yards. Meanwhile, Wing, the former Australian rules football player best known prior to Saturday for having a trick-play touchdown against Florida called back for taunting, was LSU’s most valuable player. He pinned Alabama inside its own five-yard line twice, and he crushed a 73-yarder that flipped the field in the fourth quarter at a point when the exhausted Tigers defense probably couldn’t have defended a short field.

Alleman and Wing would like the world to know that they were all for a fake at the end of the first half — which is probably why they kick and don’t coach. Wing said the conversation with Miles was more motivational and less tactical. “If he’d [asked about a fake], we would have said yes,” Wing said. “We would have done something stupid.” Miles, in spite of his reputation for brass calls, chose the sure points. …

… When the teams went to overtime, it seemed pretty clear the end zone was off-limits. Montgomery’s third-down sack of AJ McCarron forced Foster to kick a brutal 52-yarder into the wind. The kick died short of the crossbar. “It just came down to who executed on the chances they had,” Alabama linebacker Courtney Upshaw said. “They did.”

On the Tigers’ possession, LSU’s offense finally moved the ball a little. Michael Ford took the Tigers to the seven-yard line on an option pitch. Everything Alleman visualized was about to come true. Miles, Mr. Play-It-Safe, called for the field goal on third down. That way, if the snap went awry, Wing could fall on it and the Tigers could try again.

Just before he called for the snap, Wing looked back at Alleman. “You ready to go?” Wing asked. “You know it,” Alleman answered.

Snap. Hold. Kick. Celebration.

Daniel Hamermesh explains how economics can be fun. There is a lot more than this example, but you must follow the link.

Is economics actually fun?

Oh gosh, yes! Of course it’s fun. Partly because it’s relevant, but partly because there are an awful lot of things that are basically just fun stories. I wrote a book, Economics is Everywhere, which contains stories from my life and things I see, designed to illustrate economic ideas. Some of them are just hilarious. And it’s not just me, whose humour is sort of weird, I admit. Almost anyone can read them and get a good laugh out of them, while learning something. And that’s the best way to teach, I think.

Can you give me your favourite example?

I have lots of favourites! It’s like choosing among my children. How off-colour are you allowed to be on this?

It’s completely up to you.

Every year 500 students in my introductory economics class have to write a story like the ones in my book. Last year one student wrote that it was three in the morning on a Sunday, and she was in the dormitory lounge having been “sexiled”. Her roommate had thrown her out of the room, for reasons that are implicit in that term. She argued that this was a wonderful example of what we call “externalities” – her roommate and the roommate’s boyfriend were making so much noise it was impossible to sleep there. Moreover, they were also disturbing people down the hall, because the walls are so thin. There’s also the question of who owns the rights to the room – this is called an issue of “property rights”. So what the girl illustrated was both the concept of an externality, and the notion of property rights in a very cute way. I thought that was a winner. It’s not the best, but it’s well up there. The top 10 each year out of the 500 get extra credit, and I steal a few stories for my book too, with full credit to them. …

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Gregg Easterbrook tells us what will happen if the super committee fails.

Action by the debt-reduction ‘super committee’ is due in less than a week. You will not be surprised to learn the super committee may only announce grandiose goals, while “deferring” specifics to some unspecified future point.

If, after months of hype, the super committee turns out to be a Potemkin committee, taking no action against the tide of government red ink, here is what will happen: Absolutely nothing.

That’s why falling dangerously arrears on national fiscal policy is so seductive – in the short term, nothing happens. Greece, Italy, Portugal – their governments made irresponsible decision after irresponsible decision, and nothing happened. So the irresponsible decisions continued.

America’s political leadership can continue to act irresponsibly about money for years to come, and absolutely nothing will happen … until it’s too late.

Consider an analogy to household finances. My wife and I are squares about money. We borrow conservatively, repay early, plan cautious budgets and won’t buy anything unless we know we can cover the cost within a short time. The result is a nice house that’s mostly our own equity, plus retirement savings and a strong credit rating. In fiscal terms, we are pretty much where the United States was a quarter century ago.

Suppose I ran out and bought a high-end sports car for me and a diamond brooch for her. This would be irresponsible, especially from the standpoint of our three children. What would happen the next day?

Absolutely nothing. I could break years of rigorous self-discipline about debt and short-term outlook, but pay no penalty at all. …

And George Will on the committee.  

Born during what is mistakenly called the debt-ceiling “debacle” last summer, the congressional supercommittee may die without agreeing to a 10-year, $1.2 trillion (at least) deficit-reduction plan. This is not properly labeled a failure. Committee Democrats demanded more revenue; Republicans offered $500 billion; Democrats responded with the one-syllable distillation of liberalism: “More!” So the committee’s work has been a clarifying event that presages a larger one — next November’s elections.

The messiness surrounding the debt-ceiling increase was what democracy looks like when belatedly confronting big problems. Remember, Barack Obama demanded, until doing so became politically untenable, a “clean” ceiling increase — no supercommittee or other threat to his spending torrent.

The supercommittee should by now have sent its plan to the Congressional Budget Office for “scoring” — calculation of the fiscal consequences of its proposals. The law establishing the committee requires any proposal to be published in legislative language 48 hours before Nov. 23. Not that law has much to do with fiscal matters: The Democratic-controlled Senate has not produced a budget in more than 930 days. This is just one way existing budget law is ignored.

Regarding the supercommittee, Harry Reid’s and Obama’s interests diverge. Imitation is the sincerest form of politics, and Obama needs congressional failure as he seeks reelection by emulating Harry Truman in 1948, running against a “do-nothing” Congress. Reid, however, wants to remain Senate majority leader. In 2012, Democrats will be defending 23 seats, Republicans only 10. Republicans need to gain just four seats to control the Senate. Reid’s members cannot relish running while Obama is denouncing the “Republican Congress.” As if the Democratic-controlled Senate has been temporarily disassociated from Congress. …

Spengler turns his attention to MF Global and corruption in DC.

Jon Corzine’s MF Global is missing $600 million of customer money, and the bankruptcy trustee has no idea when it might be found or when investors might be paid back, if ever. The New York Times today says that the investigation points to the conclusion that the firm simply misappropriated (that is, stole) customer money to back up failing bets on the distressed bonds of failing European governments.

The former head of Goldman Sachs and Democratic governor of New Jersey presided over a firm that may turn out to have been a criminal enterprise.  Maybe the Occupy Wall Street movement should shift venue to the headquarters of the Democratic Party, which has a long pattern of involvement in outright corruption.

If this is the case — and I will patiently await the results of investigation by the proper authorities before coming to any conclusion — the only proper thing to do would be to throw the book at Corzine and his colleagues and put some people in jail for a very, very long time. In response to corporate malfeasance and Wall Street’s misbehavior in the advent of the 2008 crisis, we have had a raft of new legislation and regulation — Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, the Volcker rules, and more minutiae than the battery of corporate lawyers hired by the banks can follow. My few friends still employed in the investment banking industry are making a fraction of what they once did, but their lawyers are getting fat. The last hiring bubble in Wall Street, I’m told, is in risk management and legal services. Remember what Mother used to say: “You can’t have any new laws until you use the old ones!”

There is overwhelming documentation that key Democratic Party figures used government sponsored enterprises — the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) — to corrupt Congress on a grand scale in order to pay themselves spectacular sums. Last year Gretchen Morgenson and Josh Rosner told the sordid story in their book Reckless Endangerment: …

Just for grins, David Warren lists some of the Occupiers’ demands.

… “Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. Unionize ALL workers immediately. … Raise the minimum wage immediately to $18/hr. … Institute a moratorium on all foreclosures and layoffs immediately. … Open the borders to all immigrants, legal or illegal. … Tax the very rich at rates up to 90 per cent. … Allow workers to elect their supervisors. …

Lower the retirement age to 55. Increase Social Security benefits. …

Ban the private ownership of land. … Immediate debt forgiveness for all. … Release all political prisoners immediately. … End the ‘War on Drugs’.”

That was a fairly representative sampling, from a very wide field, across which one might reply to every single demand, “You and whose army?” For, after all, the encampment in Zuccotti Park was unable to defeat even New York City bylaws. …

Roger Simon wants us to pay attention to foreign policy.

… I am leery of a president who is a foreign policy novice.

We have seen the results of that with the incumbent. America’s foreign policy has been between non-existent and disastrous during his administration. Our leadership in the world has diminished drastically, probably intentionally, and that is horrendous for the human race.

The examples are myriad (going after Ghaddafi while virtually ignoring the far more dangerous Assad; allowing, even encouraging, the fall of Mubarak leading to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere; playing footsie with increasingly Islamist Turkey; putting undue pressure on Israel and repeatedly disrespecting her prime minister; etc.) but I can’t recall a more despicable behavior by an American president in my lifetime than Barack Obama’s reaction — or should I say non-reaction — to the democracy movement in Iran. Who can forget the brave demonstrators in the streets shouting “Obama, Obama, are you with us or against us?”

Obama didn’t hear them, choosing instead to negotiate with Ahmadinejad. This ideologically ignorant and narcissistic decision, devoid even of basic human compassion, has helped put us in the position we are today with an Islamofascist Iran on the brink of nuclear weapons.

So what does this mean in terms of the Republican candidates? …

Regarding the cost of the GM bailout, Shikha Dalmia gets to say, “I told you so.”

Am I allowed to say, I told you so?

The Treasury Department yesterday revised its loss estimate for the Government Motors bailout from $14.33 billion to $23.6 billion, thanks to the company’s sinking stock price. GM’s Sept. 30 closing price, on which the new estimate is based, was $20.18, about $13 less than its December IPO price and $35 less than what is needed for taxpayers to break even.

The $23.6 billion represents a 25 percent loss on the feds $60 billion direct “investment” in GM. But that’s not all that taxpayers are on the hook for. As I explained previously, Uncle Sam’s special GM bankruptcy package allowed the company to write off $45 billion in previous losses going forward. This could work out to as much as $15 billion in tax savings that GM wouldn’t have had had it gone through a normal bankruptcy. Why? Because after bankruptcy, the tax liabilities of companies increase since they have no more losses to write off.

This means that the total hit to taxpayers, who still own about a quarter of the company, could add up to $38.6 billion. That’s even more that the $34 billion on the outside I had predicted in May.

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Investor’s.com editors react to the suggestion we have become “lazy.”

We’re starting to grasp how hard a job the president has. It can’t be easy to rule a country filled with so many soft, lazy, greedy fat cats who can’t make good stuff anymore.

At a business forum Saturday, President Obama complained that “we’ve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades.” He apparently meant we’ve let foreign investment go slack, since “we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America.”

But this is just the latest slur against the United States uttered by its leader.

In October, Obama complained that “we have lost our ambition, our imagination and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.” Earlier that month he groused that the U.S. “used to have the best stuff” but doesn’t anymore. In September he described America as having “gotten a little soft.”

And that’s when he hasn’t been complaining about greedy Wall Street executives who think they deserve to make a profit.

But calling America lazy is going too far.

First of all, foreign direct investment has more than tripled over the past two decades. So it’s hardly like businesses abroad haven’t noticed that the U.S. is a good place to invest.

And while the president might have been too busy writing autobiographies to notice, the past two decades have shown an America that is anything but soft or lazy. Since our president doesn’t seem to know about this, here’s a quick review: …

Craig Pirrong calls our attention to articles in WaPo and NYT about the dismal record of government investments in alternative energy projects. The Professor says if you’re surprised by the poor results then you might be an idiot.

… These failures were predictable–and in fact predicted.  But the predictions have been ignored.  For decades, as the WaPo article points out in excruciating detail.  Good money has been thrown after bad which had been thrown after worse.  These decisions have been driven by political economy rather than economic calculation.  If something needs a subsidy, that means it costs too much for the value it produces.  Yes, there can be circumstances in which there is some value that is not internalized by the producer, in which a subsidy may theoretically be justified.  But as the historical record makes abundantly clear, that’s not what drives how subsidies are allocated: they come out of the political sausage grinder, and it is politics and political connections that turn the crank.

Whatever you think about ExxonMobil, they deserve credit for not buying into the “beyond petroleum” moonshinery of BP and some other supermajors in the last decade.  During the Bush years, XOM CEOs Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson steadfastly refused to commit capital into renewables and alternative energy, and resisted playing the subsidy game: they were unabashedly an oil company, and didn’t pretend otherwise.  They had seen the boondoggles of the 1970s–remember Synfuels?–and didn’t want to squander valuable capital on similar boondoggles in the new millennium.  Unfortunately, Congress and two administrations–particularly the current one–haven’t been quite so perceptive.   As a result tens of billions of dollars have been wasted, and wasted predictably.

Here’s the Washington Post article. No surprise it is much better than the Times’.

Solyndra, the solar-panel maker that received more than half a billion dollars in federal loans from the Obama administration only to go bankrupt this fall, isn’t the first dud for U.S. government officials trying to play venture capitalist in the energy industry.

The Clinch River Breeder Reactor. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation. The hydrogen car. Clean coal. These are but a few examples spanning several decades — a graveyard of costly and failed projects.

Not a single one of these much-ballyhooed initiatives is producing or saving a drop or a watt or a whiff of energy, but they have managed to burn through far more taxpayer money than the ill-fated Solyndra. An Energy Department report in 2008 estimated that the federal government had spent $172 billion since 1961 on basic research and the development of advanced energy technologies.

What does Washington have to show for these investments? And should the government even be in the business of promoting particular energy technologies?

Some economists, executives and financiers — as well as Energy Secretary Steven Chu — argue that the government must play a role because certain technologies have non-financial benefits, such as producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions or easing U.S. reliance on foreign oil. The semiconductor industry is often held up as a model of how government money can help build a new type of economy.

But others argue that the history of government attempts to reach for the holy grail of new energy technology — a history that features both political parties — is not inspiring. “We’re making very large bets, and the decisions seem to be more grounded in politics and geography than in engineering and science,” said Michael Graetz, a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of “The End of Energy.”

Consider the saga of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon set a goal of building an experimental nuclear power plant. The Clinch River reactor was supposed to be a sort of perpetual motion machine, producing power as well as plutonium that could be used in other plants.

Private utilities agreed to kick in $175 million, less than half of the $400 million that the Atomic Energy Commission estimated it would cost to build. As expenses ballooned, the government covered all the overruns. The project was criticized by activists and scientists worried about the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. Cheap uranium undercut it.

After President Ronald Reagan was elected, Clinch River survived the first round of his spending cuts, in part out of deference to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), a strong supporter of the reactor, which was in his home state. But finally, in 1983, with the Congressional Budget Office saying the cost might exceed $4 billion, Congress terminated the program. Blueprints had been drawn up, modeling done, components ordered and some ground cleared, but the reactor was never built. The price tag for the federal government: $1.7 billion ($3.9 billion in today’s dollars).

Then there was the Synthetic Fuels Corporation. …

More on DC corruption from Marc Thiessen’s OpEd book review also in the Post.

… Perhaps the most disturbing revelations come from Schweizer’s investigation into the Obama Energy Department and its infamous “green energy” loan guarantee and grant programs, a program Schweizer calls “the greatest — and most expensive — example of crony capitalism in American history.” The scandal surrounding Solyndra — the now-bankrupt, Obama-connected solar power company that received a federally guaranteed loan of $573 million — is well known. But Solyndra, Schweizer says, is only the tip of the iceberg.

According to his research, at least 10 members of President Obama’s campaign finance committee and more than a dozen of his campaign bundlers were big winners in getting tax dollars from these programs. One chart in the book details how the 10 finance committee members collectively raised $457,834, and were in turn approved for grants or loans of nearly $11.4 billion — quite a return on their investment.

In the loan-guarantee program alone, Schweizer writes, “$16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers — individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party.” That is a staggering 71 percent of the loan money.

Schweizer cites example after example of companies that received grants or loans and documents their financial connections to the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party. And he shows how “the [Energy] department’s loan and grant programs are run by partisans who were responsible for raising money during the Obama campaign from the same people who later came to seek government loans and grants.”

There is much, much more, which means that when Schweizer’s book hits stores Tuesday, heads in Washington are going to explode.

William McGurn notes how special crony capitalism is in Chicago. 

New York gave us banks too big to fail. Washington bequeathed us Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Still, when it comes to crony capitalism, no one quite matches Chicago.

Soon the Illinois state legislature will meet in special session to consider the Chicago machine’s latest favor: legislation designed to deliver tax relief to three of the state’s largest companies. These tax breaks for the lucky few come just 10 months after the Illinois legislature approved what has been described as the largest tax increase in the state’s history. It’s no coincidence that both have been supported by Gov. Pat Quinn and other top leaders of the state’s Democratic Party.

In so doing, Chicago is giving America a window into the logic of crony capitalism: Raise taxes on everyone—and then cut side deals with those big enough to lobby for special relief.

The legislature is considering this limited tax relief because three corporate mainstays of greater Chicago have threatened to leave without it. One is the CME Group, operator of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world’s largest futures exchange by volume. Another is the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the world’s largest options exchange. The last is Sears, one of America’s oldest and most famous retailing giants.  …

David Harsanyi says, “Constitutional or not, ObamaCare has to go!!”

Is not doing something the same as doing it, and should government be allowed to force you not to do the thing you’re already not doing by making you do it so you don’t not do it anymore?

That is just one of the perplexing legal questions the Supreme Court will likely find a way to say “yes” to in July after it wrestles with the constitutionality of Obamacare.

Once the court upholds the individual mandate — a provision that allows politicians to coerce citizens to purchase products in private markets (or, in this case, state-backed monopolies) — we will have precedent that puts few limits on the reach of Washington and crony capitalism. And beyond policy, Obamacare demonstrated why we should be cynical about government.

I suppose it starts with process. Obamacare was shoved through the sludge of parliamentary trickery, lies, horse trading, cooked-up numbers and false promises. Even after waiting to see what was in the bill, as Nancy Pelosi suggested, there was a historic electoral backlash. (Some people just don’t know what’s good for them.)

As for the court’s decision, it probably won’t imbue many people with any more confidence in process. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan — only recently charged with defending the administration’s positions in federal courts as solicitor general, working there while the health care law was being written and picking the legal team to defend it — will be rendering her entirely untainted decision on the matter.

Nor, as we learned this week, is it reassuring to find out that while the House was debating passage of Obamacare, Kagan and well-known legal scholar Laurence Tribe, then in the Justice Department, did a little dialoguing regarding the health care vote, and according to documents obtained by Media Research Center, Kagan wrote: “I hear they have the votes, Larry!! Simply amazing.”

Nothing says impartiality like double exclamation points!! …

Andrew Malcolm has late-night humor.

Fallon: The Miami Dolphins won their first NFL game this year! My grandma was so happy, mostly because she’s the Dolphins starting quarterback.

Fallon: The AFLAC duck balloon debuts in Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade this year. You think that’s weird. Wait til you see the balloon for that old guy from the Cialis ad.

Letterman: Kim Kardashian had a quiet intimate meeting with her new husband in Minnesota last week. It was just him, Kim, the cameraman, the sound guy, the makeup artist, a publicist, the cue card holder, the grip and, of course, the teamster driver.

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Mark Steyn thinks we could do more to live up to our slogans.

Whenever I write in these pages about the corrosive effect of Big Government upon the citizenry in Britain, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere and note that this republic is fairly well advanced upon the same grim trajectory, I get a fair few letters on the lines of: “You still don’t get it, Steyn. Americans aren’t Europeans. Or Canadians. We’re not gonna take it.”

I would like to believe it. It’s certainly the case that Americans have more attitude than anybody else — or, at any rate, attitudinal slogans. I saw a fellow in a “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt the other day. He was at LaGuardia, and he was being trod all over, by the obergropinfuhrers of the TSA, who had decided to subject him to one of their enhanced pat-downs. There are few sights more dismal than that of a law-abiding citizen having his genitalia pawed by state commissars, but him having them pawed while wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt is certainly one of them.

Don’t get me wrong. I like “Don’t Tread on Me.” Also, “Don’t Mess with Texas” — although the fact that 70 percent of births in Dallas’s largest hospital are Hispanic suggests that someone has messed with Texas in recent decades, and fairly comprehensively.

In my own state, the Department of Whatever paid some fancypants advertising agency a couple of million bucks to devise a new tourism slogan. They came up with “You’re Going To Love It Here!,” mailed it in, and cashed the check. The state put it up on the big “Bienvenue au New Hampshire” sign on I-93 on the Massachusetts border, and ten minutes later outraged Granite Staters were demanding it be removed and replaced with “Live Free or Die.” So it was. Americans are still prepared to get in-your-face about their in-your-face slogans. …

Toby Harnden says the whiff of scandal is wafting over the administration.

… the appearance of Attorney General Eric Holder on Capitol Hill last week underlined the problems that Obama faces in his re-election bid as he attempts to portray himself as an honest broker who rises above partisan politics – just as Tony “pretty much a straight kind of guy” Blair before him.

Holder was schooled in the last Democratic administration and his word-parsing performance was certainly one of Clintonian virtuosity. In a February letter, Holder’s department denied that illegal guns had been allowed into Mexico. Now that this had been revealed as untrue, Holder carefully conceded that the letter “could have been better crafted” and blamed ATF officials.

His recollection in May that he had first heard about Fast and Furious in the “past few weeks” had been mistaken, he admitted. “I should probably have said a couple of months.” He insisted that he did not read 2010 briefings about the operation that were addressed to him.

Asked whether he would apologise to Agent Terry’s family, to whom he has never spoken, he declined, preferring instead the formulation once favoured by Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, when asked about IRA atrocities. “I certainly regret what happened to Agent Terry,” he said.

By this weekend, Holder had decided he would say “sorry” to the Terry family and offered to meet them while at the same time slamming Republicans for using “inflammatory and inappropriate rhetoric about the operation in an effort to score political points”. …

An example of the above, from the Washington Post.

The Obama administration urged officers of the struggling solar company Solyndra to postpone announcing planned layoffs until after the November 2010 midterm elections, newly released e-mails show.

Solyndra, the now-shuttered California company, had been a poster child of President Obama’s initiative to invest in clean energies and received the administration’s first energy loan of $535 million. But a year ago, in October 2010, the solar panel manufacturer was quickly running out of money and had warned the Energy Department it would need emergency cash to avoid having to shut down.

The new e-mails about the layoff announcement were released Tuesday morning as part of a House Energy and Commerce committee memo, provided in advance of Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s scheduled testimony before the investigative committee Thursday.

Solyndra’s chief executive warned the Energy Department on Oct. 25, 2010, that he intended to announce worker layoffs Oct. 28. He said he was spurred by numerous calls from reporters and potential investors about rumors the firm was in financial trouble and was planning to lay off workers and close one of its two plants.

But in an Oct. 30, 2010, e-mail, advisers to Solyndra’s primary investor, Argonaut Equity, explain that the Energy Department had strongly urged the company to put off the layoff announcement until Nov. 3. The midterm elections were held Nov. 2, …

Pajamas Media post says Romney/McDonnell is a done deal.

It’s a done deal! It’s a slam dunk! You can just about start printing the bumper stickers for the 2012 Republican presidential ticket. For as a result of last week’s GOP debate and a Virginia legislative election, the Romney/McDonnell ticket has been solidified.

Mitt Romney, the inevitable Republican presidential nominee, has become even more so as a result of Rick Perry’s debate implosion. (Otherwise known as the “56 second brain freeze” that rocked the world.)

Romney looks and sounds presidential and is by default going to be the last man standing after Cain-mania settles down. This is not exactly pleasing to the conservative base, but there is “hope and change” coming for conservatives on the 2012 ticket and his name is Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia.

Governor McDonnell took a well-deserved victory lap this past week after helping the Republican Party of Virginia win control of both the Virginia General Assembly and Virginia Senate. This huge legislative victory, won with tea party support, catapults McDonnell right into Romney’s number two slot.

But for McDonnell, these favorable Virginia election results are only the cherry on top of the sundae. There are five other important reasons why McDonnell will be Romney’s running mate, served up for coronation at the 2012 Republican nominating convention in Tampa.

1. Governor Bob McDonnell is a conservative who conservatives trust.

McDonnell can make a Romney-topped ticket more palatable to the tea party/conservative base. The base currently does not trust Romney but with McDonnell as his VP, McDonnell can help “sell” Romney and soften the blow for conservatives nationally, while not scaring away moderate voters

2. Virginia is a must-win-back state for the GOP.

Obama won Virginia in 2008 by 7 percentage points, but with Governor McDonnell’s high approval rating of 62%, Romney can count on him to return Virginia into the red column where it had been for forty years since 1968.

Obama will throw everything he has at Virginia but McDonnell will triumph. Already, Tuesday’s Virginia election results are considered a bad omen for Obama nationally. …

While we’ve been looking elsewhere, a revolution has been going on in on line education. Wall Street Journal has the story.

It was nearing lunchtime on a recent Thursday, and ninth-grader Noah Schnacky of Windermere, Fla., really did not want to go to algebra. So he didn’t.

Tipping back his chair, he studied a computer screen listing the lessons he was supposed to complete that week for his public high school—a high school conducted entirely online. Noah clicked on his global-studies course. A lengthy article on resource shortages popped up. He gave it a quick scan and clicked ahead to the quiz, flipping between the article and multiple-choice questions until he got restless and wandered into the kitchen for a snack.

Noah would finish the quiz later, within the three-hour time frame that he sets aside each day for school. He also listened to most of an online lecture given by his English teacher; he could hear but not see her as she explained the concept of a protagonist to 126 ninth graders logged in from across the state. He never got to the algebra.

His sister Allison, meanwhile, has spent the past two hours working on an essay in the kitchen. She has found a new appreciation of history. At her old school, she says, the teacher stood at the blackboard and droned, and history was “the boringest class ever.” Now, thanks to the videos she’s been watching on ancient Egypt, she loves it.

In a radical rethinking of what it means to go to school, states and districts nationwide are launching online public schools that let students from kindergarten to 12th grade take some—or all—of their classes from their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. Other states and districts are bringing students into brick-and-mortar schools for instruction that is largely computer-based and self-directed.

In just the past few months, Virginia has authorized 13 new online schools. Florida began requiring all public-high-school students to take at least one class online, partly to prepare them for college cybercourses. Idaho soon will require two. In Georgia, a new app lets high-school students take full course loads on their iPhones and BlackBerrys. Thirty states now let students take all of their courses online.

Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools, up 40% in the last three years, according to Evergreen Education Group, a consulting firm that works with online schools. More than two million pupils take at least one class online, according to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a trade group. …