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Caroline Glick writes on the Netanyahu slurs by the French and American presidents.

The slurs against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu voiced by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and US President Barack Obama after last week’s G20 summit were revealing as well as repugnant.

Thinking no one other than Obama could hear him, Sarkozy attacked Netanyahu, saying, “I can’t stand to see him anymore, he’s a liar.”

Obama responded by whining, “You’re fed up with him, but me, I have to deal with him every day.”

These statements are interesting both for what they say about the two presidents’ characters and for what they say about the way that Israel is perceived by the West more generally.

To understand why this is the case it is necessary to first ask, when has Netanyahu ever lied to Sarkozy and Obama? This week the UN International Atomic Energy Agency’s report about Iran’s nuclear weapons program made clear that Israel – Netanyahu included – has been telling the truth about Iran and its nuclear ambitions all along. In contrast, world leaders have been lying and burying their heads in the sand.

Since Iran’s nuclear weapons program was first revealed to the public in 2004, Israel has provided in-depth intelligence information proving Iran’s malign intentions to the likes of Sarkozy, Obama and the UN. And for seven years, the US government – Obama included – has claimed that it lacked definitive proof of Iran’s intentions.

Obama wasted the first two years of his administration attempting to charm the Iranians out of their nuclear weapons program. He stubbornly ignored the piles of evidence presented to him by Israel that Iran was not interested in cutting a deal.

Perhaps Obama was relying on the US’s 2007 National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. As Israel said at the time, and as this week’s IAEA report proves, it was the NIE – which claimed that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 – not Israel that deliberately lied about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was the US intelligence community that purposely deceived the American government and people about the gravest immediate threat to US national security.

Israel, including Netanyahu, was telling the truth. …

Power Line posts on the Keystone Pipeline non-decision.

President Obama’s announcement that he will delay a decision on approval of the Keystone Pipeline until after the 2012 election typifies his feckless presidency. Torn between the need to create jobs, reduce the cost of energy and get our economy going on one hand, and the emotional biases of his environmentalist base on the other, Obama punted. I assume that if and when the time comes–post-election–Obama will do what he has wanted to do all along, and kill the pipeline.

We have written about Keystone a number of times. In this post, we quoted a study that concluded the pipeline would moderate the price of oil and create between 250,000 and 553,000 permanent American jobs. Here, we quoted at length another study of the beneficial effect of the pipeline on our economy, along with related energy development policies. There simply is no doubt that building the pipeline and transporting Canadian oil efficiently to refineries in the U.S. would give our economy a major boost.

I don’t suppose anyone remembers the speech that President Obama gave in support of his “Jobs Act” on September 7–ancient history, I know–and it is almost cruel to remind this inept president of his own words. This is what we wrote at the time: …

Walter Russell Mead thinks the president may regret his pipeline punt.

… The President may think he’s dodging a bullet by putting off his decision until after the election, but he has given the GOP a big pre-Christmas present, one that will go on giving as long as unemployment is a major political issue.

The nexus of environmental policy and jobs has been a kind of Bermuda Triangle for this administration, where good intentions go awry and the best laid plans misfire.  The failure of Solyndra demonstrated the poverty of “green jobs” initiatives, while the economic success of states like North Dakota and Texas are a testament to the continued effectiveness of old-style brown jobs. The President may be retreating from his failed green jobs plans, but still appears reluctant to embrace the more successful brown ones.

If times are good by 2012, voters may vote their green hopes.  If the economy is (as seems likely) still a problem, they will be voting their less verdant fears.  This may be one can the White House will come to regret having kicked down the road.

More from Canada’s Financial Post.

President Barack Obama has kicked the can down the road by postponing permission to build Canada’s Keystone XL oil sands pipeline to Texas until 2013, after the next election.

This decision, in essence, strands the oil sands indefinitely and shuts it out of the U.S. market for years, if not forever.

It’s being billed as a temporary setback, but it’s a major and devastating development.

The excuse is that a new route is going to be sought to avoid putting pipelines across the aquifer that straddles mid-America. The reality is that the environmental movement, not an aquifer, straddles the United States and cannot be circumvented. The Keystone, and Canada’s oil sands, has become the environmental movement’s line in the sand in a battle to shut down fossil fuel usage even though there are no alternative fuels for 20 or 30 more years.

These Keystone Cops have scored a victory that likely marks the beginning of a de facto pipeline moratorium south of the border. And this could cripple America’s economy and energy industries.

Keystone has received approvals over a number of years from dozens of environmental and other government agencies, been scrutinized more than other project and yet, in the end, has had its permit postponed on environmental grounds. …

Just like the Soviets, the president likes everything big; government, labor and business. Fred Barnes has the story.

By his own account, President Obama is the champion and protector of the little guy. He said last week he wants no one left “in a second-class status in this United States of America.” He’s “determined” to “make sure that nobody out there is going bankrupt just because somebody in their family is getting sick.” He’s committed to making Washington “responsive to the needs of people, not the needs of special interests [and] not just people who are hurting now, but also responsive to future generations.” Obama identifies himself with the 99 percent.

Yet the winners in the nearly three years of Obama’s presidency are the big guys?—?big business, big labor, and big government. Corporate profits have reached record levels. The influence of the biggest labor unions has surged in Washington, where it matters most. The federal government has grown in size and reach.

Meanwhile, the weak economy has hurt small business, the country’s number one job creator. Temporary tax breaks haven’t helped, and the threat of new taxes and a fresh barrage of regulations have put a crimp in expansion and hiring. Big business isn’t expanding or hiring much either. A headline in Slate reflected this: “More Profits, Fewer Jobs.” 

Labor leaders have entrée at the White House and federal departments and agencies as never before. The most frequent visitor to the White House in Obama’s first year was Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union. The president delayed trade treaties with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia until they were altered to satisfy labor officials. If Obama understands that higher levels of unionization are associated with greater joblessness, he’s never let on.

Big government is a cliché that’s all the more true in the Obama era. Federal employment grew by 140,800 in Obama’s first two years, and the clout of federal officialdom has increased substantially. …

George Mason econ prof Tyler Cowen reviews a new book on Keynes and Hayek.

Keynes vs. Hayek” has turned out to be a more durable theme than could have been expected in the 1930s. As recently as the 1990s, big-time macroeconomic debates seemed to be over forever; the Nineties seem now like a very long time ago.

On the side of Hayek, Glenn Beck propelled The Road to Serfdom to No. 1 on Amazon with his repeated warnings that President Obama was bringing socialism to the United States. The man overseeing the Federal Reserve in the House of Representatives, Ron Paul (R., Texas), is an avowed fan of Hayek’s 1970s “denationalization of money” idea.

On the other side, Paul Krugman, through his New York Times column and blog, has revived the fortunes of Keynesian economics by insisting that we are suffering from a shortfall of spending or “aggregate demand.” A big swath of the economics profession has become more Keynesian in the last five years. Krugman, Brad DeLong, and other writers devote a lot of energy to attacking the Hayekian vision of macroeconomics, which by now is over 80 years old; Krugman coined the now-current term “Austerian” to describe those who believe in both Hayek’s “Austrian” economics and a policy of fiscal austerity.

Most notoriously, Hayek and Keynes square off in two rap videos, produced by economist Russ Roberts and filmmaker John Papola. The first video has received over two and a half million views and the second, released this year, is already over 1 million views. The auteurs present both sides of the debate, but a careful viewing of the second video shows that while Hayek wins the fight, analogized in terms of a boxing match, the referee calls it for Keynes. In July, the London School of Economics staged an actual Hayek vs. Keynes debate, with contemporary scholars filling the roles.

So what’s all the fuss about? Nicholas Wapshott’s new book, Keynes Hayek, does an excellent job of setting out the broader history behind this revival of the old debates. …

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Mark Steyn on the contemptible ones and their budget tricks.

Have you been following this so-called Supercommittee? They’re the new superhero group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss. There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt.  The Supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.

I had cynically assumed that the Superfriends would address America’s imminent debt catastrophe with some radical reform – such as, say, slowing the increase in spending by raising the age for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 47 to 49 by the year 2137, after which triumph we could all go back to sleep until total societal collapse.

But I underestimated the genius of the Superfriends’ Supercommittee.  It turns out that a committee created to reduce the deficit is, instead, going to increase it. As The Hill reported:

“Democrats on the supercommittee have proposed that the savings from the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be used to pay for a new stimulus package, according to a summary of the $2.3 trillion plan obtained by The Hill.”

Do you follow that? Let the Congressional Budget Office explain it to you:

“The budget savings from ending the wars are estimated to total around $1 trillion over a decade, according to an estimate in July from the Congressional Budget Office.”

Let us note in passing that, according to the official CBO estimates, a whole decade’s worth of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan adds up to little more than Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill.  But, aside from that, in what sense are these “savings”? The Iraq war is ended – or, at any rate, “ended,” at least as far as U.S. participation in it is concerned. How then can congressional accountants claim to be able to measure “savings” in 2021 from a war that ended a decade earlier? And why stop there? Why not estimate around $2 trillion in savings by 2031? After all, that would free up even more money for a bigger stimulus package. wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t cost us anything because it would all be “savings.”

Come to think of it, didn’t the Second World War end in 1945? Could we have the CBO score the estimated two-thirds of a century of “budget savings” we’ve saved since ending that war? We could use the money to fund free Master’s degrees in Complacency and Self-Esteem Studies for everyone, and that would totally stimulate the economy. The Spanish-American War ended 103 years ago, so imagine how much cash has already piled up! Like they say at Publishers’ Clearing House, you may already have won! …

Think Mark Steyn is over-wrought? Here’s historian Niall Ferguson;

… So why should Americans care about any of this? The first reason is that, with American consumers still in the doldrums of deleveraging, the United States badly needs buoyant exports if its economy is to grow at anything other than a miserably low rate. And despite all the hype about trade with the Chinese, U.S. exports to the European Union are nearly three times larger than to China.

Until March, it seemed as if exports to Europe were on an upward trajectory. But the eurozone crisis has stopped that. Governments that ran up excessive debts have seen their borrowing costs explode. Unable to devalue their currencies, they’ve been forced to adopt austerity measures—cutting spending or hiking taxes—in a vain effort to reduce their deficits. The result has been Depression economics: shrinking economies and unemployment rates approaching 20 percent.

As a result, according to the new president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, a “double dip” recession in Europe is now all but inevitable. And that’s lousy news for U.S. exporters targeting the EU market.

But there’s more. Europe’s problem is not just that governments are overborrowed. There are an unknown number of European banks that are effectively insolvent if their holdings of government bonds are “marked to market”—in other words, valued at their current rock-bottom market prices. …

Joe Nocera on the real scandal at Penn State.

… Big-time college football requires grown men to avert their eyes from the essential hypocrisy of the enterprise. Coaches take home multimillion-dollar salaries, while the players who make them rich don’t even get “scholarships” that cover the full cost of attending college. They push their “student-athletes” to take silly courses that won’t get in the way of football. When players are seriously injured and can no longer play, their coaches often yank their scholarships, forcing them to drop out of school.

“College football and men’s basketball has drifted so far away from the educational purpose of the university,” James Duderstadt, a former president of the University of Michigan, told me recently. “They exploit young people and prevent them from getting a legitimate college education. They place the athlete’s health at enormous risk, which becomes apparent later in life. We are supposed to be developing human potential, not making money on their backs. Football strikes at the core values of a university.”

It is true that Joe Paterno ran a better program than most, and that no university outside of Notre Dame has benefited more from having a football team than Penn State. Its football renown helped turn a small-time state school into an important research university. But it is also true that, in 2009, Penn State football generated a staggering $50 million in profit on $70 million in revenue, according to figures compiled by the Department of Education. Protecting those profits is the real core value of college football — at Penn State and everywhere else.

What goes on in the typical big-time college football program constitutes abuse of the athletes who play the game. It’s not sexual abuse, to be sure, but it’s wrong just the same. For 46 years, Joe Paterno averted his eyes to the daily injustices, large and small, that his players suffered — just like Nick Saban does at Alabama and Steve Spurrier at South Carolina, and all the rest of them. When Paterno averted his eyes from Jerry Sandusky, he was just doing what came naturally as a college football coach.

A Corner Post on an outrage.

If you’re a parent who accepts Medicaid payments from the State of Michigan to help support your mentally-disabled adult children, you qualify as a state employee for the purposes of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). They can now claim and receive a portion of your Medicaid in the form of union dues.

Robert and Patricia Haynes live in Michigan with their two adult children, who have cerebral palsy. The state government provides the family with insurance through Medicaid, but also treats them as caregivers. For the SEIU, this makes them public employees and thus members of the union, which receives $30 out of the family’s monthly Medicaid subsidy. The Michigan Quality Community Care Council (MQC3) deducts union dues on behalf of SEIU…

Mr. and Mrs. Haynes, of course, are both the parents (the employer) and the health care providers for their children, but they still lose money to the SEIU every month, despite having no interest in joining the union. They have been arbitrarily classified as state employees so that the union can take money from them.

A student at Clemson on the waste involved in ethanol.

… Negative consequences of ethanol abound.  

Ethanol production increases the price of corn used for food. The price of corn is skyrocketing, which raises the price of all corn-based products. 24% of the U.S. corn crop is now mandated to go to ethanol, which is causing shocks to global markets as third-world nations must pay more for this food staple. Ethanol production competes with land space for other food products, using an estimated 11 acres worth of land per vehicle fueled by ethanol per year.

Ethanol appears to be “environmentally friendly,” but it is not.

Ethanol releases 19% more carbon dioxide than gasoline. For those who believe that human-produced carbon dioxide plays a role in global climate change, this is not a good statistic.

Ethanol production requires enormous water resources. According to the Water Education Foundation, a pound of corn requires 118 gallons of water to grow. Given the 21 pounds of corn required to produce one gallon of ethanol, that’s almost 2500 gallons of water used, not including water in the distillation stage. So when filling their gas tanks, most Americans now indirectly consume over 2500 gallons of water. …

Shorts from National Review

On Halloween, according to the U.N., the world’s population hit an estimated 7 billion. All the predictable hand-wringing ensued from all the predictable quarters, though by this point the anguished response has a ritualistic quality, since it was the fourth time the odometer has turned over since Paul Ehrlich’s hysterical 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb ignited a wave of neo-Malthusianism. Malthus’s and Ehrlich’s argument was simple: Fixed amount of arable land, ever-increasing population, result starvation. Yet while the world’s capacity to feed people may not be infinite, there is no reason to believe that 6 or 7 or 10 billion is anywhere near the limit. It is now clear that science can expand agricultural production greatly; that starvation is almost always the result of bad government, not finite resources; and that prosperity and modernity, especially the education of women, will lead to a natural decrease in birth rates. So we greet Baby 7B by saying the more the merrier, and hoping his or her generation will realize that the best fix for the purported ills of overpopulation is not planned economies, forced wealth transfers, or draconian limits on family size, but technology, democracy, and free markets.

An enduring problem for liberal presidents is that the people they govern just cannot seem to rise to the chief executive’s high standards of idealism and self-sacrifice. The canonical expression of liberal presidential disappointment in us, the citizenry, was Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “malaise” speech: “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” etc. Now we are hearing similar complaints from Barack Obama. Back in September, he told an interviewer that we have “gotten a little soft.” Then here he was the other day at a fundraiser in San Francisco saying that “we have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.” Well, Mr. President, our willingness to do those things sprang from the desire to improve our lives and those of our fellow citizens through honest individual enterprise — the motive force for all our nation’s progress. Since that desire is presumably a human universal, we should ask what is currently stifling it. The answers are not hard to find: excessive regulation, taxation, and litigation. Is there any prospect of this triple burden’s being lightened? Not under Barack Obama’s administration. …

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Looking at last week’s election results, Charles Krauthammer says 2012 will be a struggle for the forces of  – - – truth, justice, and the American Way.

The 2011 off-year elections are a warning to Republicans. The 2010 party is over. 2012 will be a struggle. …

… Tuesday showed that the powerful Republican tailwind of 2010 (I prefer non-culinary metaphors) is now becalmed. Between now and November 2012, things can break either way.

They have already been breaking every which way. In this year’s congressional special elections resulting from the resignation of scandal-embroiled incumbents, New York-26, traditionally conservative, went Democratic; New York-9, forever Democratic, went Republican. Add now the four evenly split gubernatorial races and Ohio’s split decision on its two highly ideological initiatives — and you approach equipoise.

Nothing is written. Contrary to the condescending conventional wisdom, the American electorate is no angry herd, prepared to stampede on the command of today’s most demagogic populist. Mississippi provided an exemplary case of popular sophistication — it defeated a state constitutional amendment declaring that personhood begins at fertilization. Voters were concerned about the measure’s ambiguity (which would grossly empower unelected judges) and its myriad unintended consequences (regarding, for example, infertility treatment and life-threatening ectopic pregnancies). Remarkably, this rejection was carried out by an electorate decidedly pro-life.

And smart. So too across the nation, as we saw Tuesday. This is no disoriented, easily led citizenry. On the contrary. It is thoughtful and discriminating. For Republicans, this means there is no coasting to victory, 9 percent unemployment or not. They need substance. They need an articulate candidate with an agenda and command of the issues who is light on slogans and lighter still on baggage.

But, Kimberley Strassel celebrates GOP wins in Virginia.

… the White House is pouring resources into what Tim Kaine, the state’s former Democratic governor, now pridefully refers to as Democrats’ “New Dominion.” The Obama campaign has held some 1,600 events in the state in the last half-year alone. Only last month Mr. Obama hopped a three-day bus trip through Virginia and North Carolina. Obama officials keep flocking to the state, and Tuesday’s election was to offer the first indication of how these efforts are succeeding.

Let’s just say the New Dominion is looking an awful lot like the Old Dominion. If anything, more so.

Virginia Republicans added seven new seats to their majority in the House of Delegates, giving them two-thirds of that chamber’s votes—the party’s largest margin in history. The GOP also took over the Virginia Senate in results that were especially notable, given that Virginia Democrats this spring crafted an aggressive redistricting plan that had only one aim: providing a firewall against a Republican takeover of that chamber. Even that extreme gerrymander didn’t work.

Every Republican incumbent—52 in the House, 15 in the Senate—won. The state GOP is looking at unified control over government for only the second time since the Civil War. This is after winning all three top statewide offices—including the election of Gov. Bob McDonnell—in 2009, and picking off three U.S. House Democrats in last year’s midterms.

Topline figures aside, what ought to really concern the White House was the nature of the campaign, and the breakout of Tuesday’s election data. Mr. Obama may have big plans for Virginia, but the question is increasingly: him and what army? …

David Harsanyi, in reference to Rick Perry’s faux pas, thinks it’s unlikely anyone is going to abolish federal departments.

… Remember that it is within these agencies that regulatory regimes blossom and economic growth is inhibited, where winners and loser are picked, where subsidies are handed out, where bad policy is implemented, and where nannies concoct their plans. This bureaucratic outbreak hit the nation under FDR and has yet to be put down.

So there is a legitimate argument for reducing the power of these agencies but it’s not going to happen anytime soon. To begin with no president is going to have the power to come in and shut them down – not today. Moreover, none of these Republicans candidates – including Perry – have the skills, the support and the political backbone to do the job. And I don’t believe any of them would even try.

Fortunately, or tragically, there are plenty of pressing and real problems they can tackle. Give us a real plan for reforming entitlements, for cutting spending and for creating a more prosperous atmosphere for the economy. Talk of shutting down departments is a convenient position but it’s also a platitudinous one that makes a candidate look unserious.

Craig Pirrong, the Streetwise Professor wants to make sure we don’t ignore the importance of Bill Daley getting his sails trimmed at the White House.

… Daley was seen by many in corporate America as someone who would serve as a counterweight to Obama’s leftist instincts.  That’s obviously not going to happen.  And that’s why this story deserves more attention than it has gotten.  It is an indication of where Obama is going. (And just to make clear: I am no fan of Daleyesque corporatism.)

I also surmise that there’s another thing going on here, a Chicago game.  Although Chicago is a One Party State, that party is rent into factions that barely coexist at the best of times, and battle viciously at others.  Obama’s alter ego, Valerie Jarrett, and Daley are from opposing, hostile, factions.  Jarrett was not pleased by Daley’s presence.  Jarrett is a hardcore progressive.  Daley’s goal–as described by Chait–was to soften the progressivism.

Daley’s departure likely marks Jarrett’s victory.  It also signals, as Chait suggests, a turn to a more hardcore progressive policy and strategy: if Jarrett has the wheel, there ain’t going to be any right turns.  It is a move towards the Occupy types and a move away from the corporatist, Democratic party establishment personified by Daley.

Helluva choice, eh?

But it means that the next 12 months will be even more confrontational and contentious, and the next election will be among the most divisive in recent history.  I’m thinking ‘68, or something in the 19th century divisive.

Today saw another indication of Obama’s choice.  He has delayed consideration of the Keystone Pipeline from Canada to the US.  This represents another genuflection to Obama’s environmentalist, leftist base. …

Yuval Levin has more.

… The move certainly suggests a continuing difficulty to manage the tension between the president’s two almost equally delusional self images—the pragmatic centrist reaching out to Republicans and the populist progressive fighting for the people against the powerful. These two approaches would require two quite different kinds of political strategies, and each would be well served by a different kind of chief of staff. Of course, President Obama is not actually a pragmatic centrist (witness everything he did in his first two years, his attitude and substantive proposals in every confrontation with this congress, and his assertions that Republicans want dirty air and water and would love to give mercury poisoning to children, for instance), and is not actually a populist progressive (witness his deep ties to and reliance on Wall Street and his overall regulatory agenda which basically amounts to institutionalized crony capitalism, for instance). Rather, he is an elitist liberal technocrat whose definition of pragmatism is agreement with him and whose idea of populism is resentment of people who disagree with him. It’s hard to fathom what the appropriate political strategy (and the appropriate chief of staff) for that sort of president should look like, so it’s not hard to see why he hasn’t found one.

Even so, and even if the president has concluded that Bill Daley is not the right chief for him at this moment, which is certainly his prerogative, just purely as a matter of managing his administration this kind of demotion is peculiar. President Obama came into office with no experience as an executive, and his style of management suggests that nearly three years in office may have given him only the wrong kind of experience. This latest move seems like one he will soon regret.

Of course, Andrew Malcolm has a more humorous take on the Daley demotion.

William Daley, President Obama’s chief of staff-in-name-only-now-because-we-don’t-want-a-mess-of-media-stories-about-bureaucratic-infighting-on-the-sinking-White-House-ship, is still employed today because he’s from Chicago and his family has been very good to Barack Obama and those around him for a long time.

That’s the way Daley’s father ran the Cook County machine all those years. And the same for Daley’s brother, who just retired as mayor last spring, leaving the job for Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who was hired more than two decades ago by the White House Daley to help the Chicago Daley.

That was before the Chicago Daley hired Michelle Robinson to help his chief of staff Valerie Jarrett, which was before Ms. Robinson became Mrs. Obama, which was before President Obama hired Ms. Jarrett as a key Oval Office aide.

Perhaps you get a sense of how professionally incestuous is the Chicago Democratic machine, now with a branch office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Machine ties can be broken only by betrayal or federal indictment …

We go to the Daily Beast to see the move in the eyes of card-carrying creepy liberals like Eleanor Clift.

Washington loves a good story about White House intrigue, who’s up and who’s down, and so the news that Chief of Staff Bill Daley would be giving up a portion of his duties had everyone speculating about the real reason for the mini-shakeup. Not surprisingly, Press Secretary Jay Carney cautioned reporters not to make too much of what he minimized as merely a move to make the White House run more efficiently. He said it was Daley’s idea to shed some of his responsibilities, and to have another of the president’s men, Pete Rouse, a seasoned congressional hand, take on more of the day-to-day management of the White House.

But wait, this is Washington, and nobody gives up power willingly, so here’s what happened, according to people who know the players. Daley was always miscast. He’s a Chicago businessman, accustomed to being in charge and impatient with Congress. He got much of the blame for the debt-ceiling debacle last summer that brought the government to the brink of default. While that took its toll, it was not fatal, says a Daley friend. “What was fatal: the accumulated weight of not moving the needle.”

In other words, with President Obama’s approval rating stuck in the low 40s, and nothing seeming to move the numbers, the shift to the center that Daley symbolized when he was brought into the White House in January was scrapped for a populist bid to reclaim the Democratic base. The result: Daley was not happy.

According to a veteran lobbyist, word got back to the White House that the chief of staff was up on Capitol Hill distancing himself from the president, saying, “They’re not listening to me.” That’s a cardinal sin for a White House adviser, and in a city where the buildings have ears, it’s not one that stays hidden for long.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, posted on his blog the possible reasons why Herman Cain continues to poll well.

… Consider all of the employee lawsuits and out of court settlements of which you have personal knowledge. Your list can include sexual harassment claims plus all other types of employee claims, including cases involving injuries and unfair practices. Include only situations in which you were personally involved or you know the people who were. My question is this: What percentage of these employee claims do you know for sure to be bullshit?

I’ll go first. I owned two restaurants for years, and you can imagine how many claims I saw. Before that, I worked at the local phone company, and before that for a large bank. I’ve had personal knowledge of perhaps twenty employee claims against employers. To the best of my knowledge, 100% of them were bullshit. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression. And impressions matter. (None were sexual harassment cases.)

I’m using the term bullshit instead of “true” because there’s a slight difference. In some cases the employees took advantage of obscure labor laws and found ways to force settlements without ever experiencing any damages.

Now consider the average Republican mindset. We’re talking about a pro-employer group of voters. For many of these voters, Cain’s situation will remind them of all the dishonest employee claims they’ve seen. For many people, especially men, Cain will look like a typical employer getting sued every five minutes by employees looking for cash settlements. Voting for Cain will feel like a vote against fraudulent employee claims, even if that is the opposite of reality. It will FEEL like a referendum against fraudulent claims.

The other factor working in Cain’s favor is his absurd level of confidence and optimism. …

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The president finds another way to insult Israel and Netanyahu. Elliot Abrams has the story.

If Prime Minister Netanyahu were to ask a fair-minded, balanced, sensible adviser what he could realistically do to win the confidence and approbation of President Obama, the answer would have to be “nothing.”

Two examples prove the point.

1. In May, Netanyahu moved the Likud Party considerably to the center in his speech to the opening of the summer session of the Knesset. In that speech he discussed relations with the Palestinians and called for a “long term IDF presence along the Jordan River,” and said “we agree that we must maintain the settlement blocs.” In other words, he was saying that the Israeli presence along the Jordan would be that of soldiers only, not settlers, and that it would in any event not be permanent; and he was saying that only the settlement blocs, not all settlements no matter how small and isolated, would remain with Israel.

The Obama administration’s reaction to these important statements was, well, nothing. Zero. They did not commend them, or even acknowledge that they were important. They were so certain in their view of Netanyahu as a recalcitrant right-winger that they did not even pay attention to what he was saying. …

Alana Goodman has more in Contentions.

There were some legitimate questions about the veracity of this story last night, but Reuters has apparently confirmed it today. At the G-20 summit meeting earlier this month, a technical error reportedly broadcast a private conversation between President Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy to a roomful of reporters – including some undiplomatic carping about Benjamin Netanyahu:

“I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama, unaware that the microphones in their meeting room had been switched on, enabling reporters in a separate location to listen in to a simultaneous translation.

“You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama replied, according to the French interpreter.

Israeli critics of Netanyahu weighed in on the comments in the Jerusalem Post, with Labor MK Daniel Ben-Simon saying that he’s “embarrassed” that Bibi is shown such little respect by allies. But Obama should be the one most embarrassed by this faux pas, which he can expect to be used by Republican presidential candidates to attack his frosty relationship with Israel.

It’s hardly news that Obama and Netanyahu aren’t on friendly terms. But this is one of the more public displays of Obama’s hostility toward the Israeli prime minister, and the latest in a string of diplomatic clashes between the two. Obama’s record provides more than enough evidence that he’s not interested in dealing fairly with Israel, and these comments only add to that. Not only did Obama hand his opponents an easy attack with this, he also came off looking amateurish, unprofessional and catty.

Michael Barone reviews Tuesday’s vote.

The biggest result was Ohio Governor John Kasich’s defeat on Issue 2. Voters cast 61% of their votes (as I write) to repeal Kasich’s law, which had been backed by Republican majorties in the legislature (with some defections). Kasich’s effort is part of a struggle to rein in public employee unions, which use taxpayers’ money (in the form of union dues) to elect pliable politicians who then confer benefits on their members —especially generous health care and pensions—which then result in economy-killing tax rates. It’s a kind of economic death spiral for states and localities where public employee unions are a major political force.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to rein in their powers with a series of ballot propositions in November 2005. The unions spent something like $100 million and defeated him. Unions spent a proportionate amount, more than $30 million it has been reported, in Ohio, a state whose population is about 30% the size of California’s.

There is some consolation here. The same Ohio voters—and the turnout seems to have been just about as high as in November 2010—who voted 61% against Kasich’s public employee union restrictions also voted 66% for Issue 3, which purported to shield Ohioans from any mandate to buy health insurance. This was a clear repudiation of Obamacare, and about half the folks that the unions turned out voted against Obamacare. There were something like 300,000 of them, or almost 10% of the total votes cast, reported as absentee balloters in the big industrial counties (Cuyahoga, Trumbull, Mahoning, Lucas, Montgomery, Franklin, Hamilton) before any other votes were counties.

But the real bragging rights here belong to the public employee unions and the Democrats. …

More from Red State.

Issue 2 in Ohio has failed. Unions poured a gazillion dollars into Ohio and won.  Despite having a sense of this outcome for some time it still stings.  Believe it or not, a great many felt that these reforms were important steps in bring fiscal and structural sanity to government.  The voters clearly did not get that message.

The media is going to try and play this as horse race politics. Governor John Kasich lost and the Democrats won.  And obviously, in some important sense – even if only in the fact the story and perspective being conventional wisdom – this is true. Kasich and Republicans passed this legislation and it has been rejected.  Fair enough.

But I personally believe there is a simpler explanation.  Voters like their local cops, firefighters, nurses and teachers.  In many ways, they idealize these type of positions even if they don’t like the state of education or public safety, etc.  Thus opponents of reform had a very easy and emotionally effective message: Senate Bill 5 is an attack on the “everyday heroes” who protect our communities.  It doesn’t really matter if this was true or not.  In a 30 second ad it is easy to say and makes an emotional connection. This is a huge advantage in a statewide ballot issue.

Combine this with the huge financial advantage the opponents had …

And from Mark Steyn.

Big Labor’s victory over John Kasich’s reforms in Ohio is a reminder to conservatives that we’re still a long way from closing the deal. A majority of the citizenry seem to agree that the nation’s mired and that their homes and jobs and futures are sinking with it. But that same majority is not yet sold on transformative rollbacks of government and the public sector. They seem to think that out there somewhere there’s a way to get the good times back that’s more or less pain-free. More fool them – which is to say Obama & Co will have a pretty good shot at fooling them.

Somewhere in either my current book or the previous one (or possibly both), I cite the line Gerald Ford used to use to ingratiate himself with conservatives: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” That may be true, but there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the problem Mr Papandreou’s ministry has in Athens, and the Kasich administration in Ohio, and many other governments around the western world.

So it’s easy for reformers to get voted in, and easy for their opponents to make sure their reforms get voted down. I’m afraid things are going to get a lot worse before that dynamic shifts.

Joel Kotkin writes on the LA push to fund a stadium.

Over the past decade Los Angeles has steadily declined. It currently has one of the the highest unemployment rates (roughly 12.5%) in the U.S, and there’s little sign of a sustained recovery. The city and county have become a kind of purgatory for all but the most politically connected businesses, while job creation and population growth lag not only the vibrant Texas cities but even aged competitors such as New York.

Rather than address general business conditions, which sorely need fixing, L.A. Mayor Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the other ruling elites have instead focused on revitalizing the city’s urban core, which has done little to boost the region’s overall economy in generations. The most recent example of such foolishness is a $1.5 billion plan to build a football stadium, named Farmers Field, downtown, unanimously approved by the city’s City Council and backed by the city’s “progressive” state delegation.

Like most of  the dominant political class, California Senator and former City Council member  Alex Padilla cites the sad state of the local economy as justification for approving the plan. But, in reality, it’s hard to find something more profoundly irrelevant than a football stadium.

Indeed years of independent investigations have discovered that urban vanity projects like sports teams and convention centers add little to permanent employment or overall regional economic well-being. …

Football stadiums? How about government efforts to promote Christmas Trees. Yuval Levin has the story.

If, like me, you have been terribly worried about the declining status and image of Christmas trees lately, worry not: the Obama administration is on the case! As Heritage notes this morning:

In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board.  The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expand existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)).  And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).

To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52).  And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees.

The administration offered no specific estimate of how many jobs would be created or saved by the Christmas Tree Promotion Board and the new Christmas tree tax, but we can assume the number is very high.

Andrew Malcolm says the tax got scrapped yesterday morning.

… Since the economy is back humming again and unemployment has plummeted, the Obama administration published in the Federal Register Tuesday its intention to charge a new 15 cent tax on cut Christmas trees this year. The Democrats don’t need congressional approval for that baby. The Ag Dept. needn’t wait. Just do it.

So what if eventually some people stop buying American-grown trees and switch to fake ones from China.

But wait! The overnight outrage was quicker than a pajama-clad four-year-old sliding down the stairs on Christmas morning. With the president just off Air Force One from Europe and Pennsylvania and about to head off to Hawaii, the White House was desperate to snuff this guaranteed PR loser.

Scrooge Obama. Tiny Tim Geithner. Ebenezer Biden. The possibilities for fun in this gaffe are endless. …

Michael Graham has a good thought. Maybe not all people should go to college.

… “We should be doing everything we can to put a college education within reach for every American,” President Barack Obama told a group of college students in Denver last week. “College isn’t just one of the best investments you can make in your future. It’s one of the best investments America can make in our future.”

Before we beat this nonsensical notion to death with the latest data, take a second and think about the young people you know. The kid behind the fast-food counter, the geek camped out at Best Buy waiting for the Call of Duty game, the girl popping her gum at the hair salon.

Would it really be the “best investment in America” to spend $100,000 of our money sending each one of them to college?

Because that’s what we’re talking about: your money. Every year Massachusetts taxpayers pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the University of Massachusetts system, subsidizing college costs for all. Add the $36 billion in federal Pell Grants and that giant sucking sound is the money going from your wallet to some kid’s six-year bong party known as “the college experience.”

And what’s the big payoff? Some entitled punk waving a “Debt Is Slavery!” sign outside a shabby tent on Dewey Square. This is America’s “best investment?” …

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Although it’s not billed as a book review, Malcolm Gladwell was in The New Yorker writing about Walter Issacson’s book on Steve Jobs.

… Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell (Jobs’ wife) tells Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. He talks to everyone in Jobs’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase. . . . He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”

Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. He then charts the even greater triumphs at Pixar and at a resurgent Apple, when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes. …

… In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the icons on the screen—from the engineers at Xerox PARC, after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.” Smart phones started coming out in the nineteen-nineties. Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, more than a decade later, because, Isaacson writes, “he had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players used to.” The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft, who was married to a friend of the Jobs family, and who invited Jobs to his fiftieth-birthday party. …

… The angriest Isaacson ever saw Steve Jobs was when the wave of Android phones appeared, running the operating system developed by Google. Jobs saw the Android handsets, with their touchscreens and their icons, as a copy of the iPhone. He decided to sue. As he tells Isaacson:

Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.

In the nineteen-eighties, Jobs reacted the same way when Microsoft came out with Windows. It used the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh. Jobs was outraged and summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’ ”

Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. “Well, Steve,” Gates responded. “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” …

John Stossel says unions are bad for kids, but really good for bad teachers.

A just-retired public school principal writes me after my special:

“You nailed the problems and issues in today’s public education… with the current teacher unions, textbook companies, and especially teacher TENURE… teacher “tenure” is all but stopping 21st Century educational reform all over the United States.”

Tenure is bad. Some teachers are more effective than others – yet the union frowns on giving the best teachers extra pay for excellence. They even frown on paying lousy teachers less. They snarl at the idea of ever firing a teacher. Public school teachers typically get tenure once they’ve taught for about 3 years. After that, the union and civil service protection make it just about impossible to fire them. They basically have a job for life.

In Patterson, NJ, it’s ex-police detective Jim Smith’s job to investigate claims against bad teachers and to try to go through the union-created, insane process of trying to fire REALLY bad ones. He says it’s so hard to fire anyone that it took years to fire a teacher who hit kids. “It took me four years and $283,000. $127,000 in legal fees plus what it cost to have a substitute fill in, all the while he’s sitting home having popcorn,” said Smith.

This is not how it works in real life: the private sector. Remember when GE was a phenomenal growth company, rather than the bloated “partner” with Big Government it is now? Its CEO at the time, Jack Welch, said what was crucial was “identifying the bottom 10 percent of employees, giving them a year to improve, and then firing them if they didn’t get better.” …

Canada has the same occupiers. Margaret Wente of the Toronto Globe and Mail takes a look.

Laurel O’Gorman is one of the faces of Occupy Toronto. She believes the capitalist system has robbed her of her future. At 28, she’s studying for a master’s degree in sociology at Laurentian University in Sudbury. She’s also the single mother of two children. “I’m here because I don’t know what kind of job I could possibly find that would allow me to pay rent, take care of these two children and pay back $600 each month in loans,” she said.

Ms. O’Gorman is in a fix. But I can’t help wondering whether she, and not the greedy Wall Street bankers, is the author of her own misfortune. Just what kind of jobs did she imagine are on offer for freshly minted sociology graduates? Did she bother to ask? Did it occur to her that it might be a good idea to figure out how to support her children before she had them?

She’s typical in her bitter disappointment. Here’s Boston resident Sarvenaz Asasy, 33, who has a master’s degree in international human rights, along with $60,000 in student loans. She dreamed of doing work to help the poor get food and education. But now she can’t find a job in her field. She blames the government. “They’re cutting all the grants, and they’re bailing out the banks. I don’t get it.”

Then there’s John, who’s pursuing a degree in environmental law. He wants to work at a non-profit. After he graduated from university, he struggled to find work. “I had to go a full year between college and law school without a job. I lived at home with my parents to make ends meet.” He thinks a law degree will help, but these days, I’m not so sure.

These people make up the Occupier generation. …

John Tamny says we need to stop worrying about the loss of manufacturing jobs.

… To put it simply, we’re manufacturing more than ever, albeit with a great deal less in the way of human input. This is what they call progress.

Indeed, as a recent USA Today editorial noted, “American companies are making lots of stuff”, and in fact they’re producing “about 80% more than in 1979 with nearly 8 million fewer workers.” Some would like to blame China for this development, but in truth they should be cheering the very innovations that attract job creating investment by virtue of companies doing more with less.

For one, the happy destruction of jobs was always thus, and it’s a signal of an advancing society. Considering agriculture, from 1900-1920 in the U.S. agriculture and mining accounted for 30-40% of total employment. Today that number is a fraction, but far from pushing Americans to the breadlines, economic evolution pushed them into better, higher valued work. Would anyone in their right mind really like to return to the days in which the U.S. economy was largely farm based? The same applies to manufacturing.

Considering manufacturing, if we date its decline as an employer to the 1970s, it should be said that the drop in actual workers has coincided with a rise in higher-paying work away from the factory floor. Specifically since the ‘70s, managerial and professional employment has been the fastest growing job category.

The definition of productivity is reducing costs without reducing output, and American manufacturers have done just that. But as evidenced by the rise of better paying managerial and professional work, Americans have hardly suffered this increase in productivity. …

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Fred Singer past UVA prof writes on why he is a global warming skeptic.

Last month the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project released the findings of its extensive study on global land temperatures over the past century. Physics professor Richard Muller, who led the study, heralded the findings with a number of controversial statements in the press, including an op-ed in this newspaper titled “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism.” And yet Mr. Muller remains a true skeptic—a searcher for scientific truth. I congratulate Mr. Muller and his Berkeley Earth team for undertaking this difficult task in the realm of climate.

The Berkeley study reported a warming trend of about 1º Celsius since 1950, even greater than the warming reported by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I disagree with this result, which perhaps makes me a little more of a skeptic than Mr. Muller.

Mr. Muller has been brutally frank about the poor quality of the weather-station data, noting that 70% of U.S. stations involve uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius. One could interpret the Berkeley study’s results as confirmation of earlier studies and of the IPCC’s conclusions, despite the poor quality of the stations used. But perhaps the issue is that the Berkeley study and the ones that came before suffer from common errors. I suspect that the temperature records still are affected by the urban heat-island effect—a term given to any local warming, whatever its cause—despite efforts to correct for this. The urban heat-island effect could include heat produced not only in urban areas, but also due to changes in land use or poor station siting. Therefore, I suggest additional tests: …

Prices keep going up for a product that is worse and worse. It’s great to be in the college business according to Jack Kelly.

The biggest consumer ripoff in America today — and the next economic bubble to burst — is higher education.

Tuition and fees at colleges and universities rose 439 percent between 1982 and 2007. Median family income rose just 147 percent during that period.

Median household income has fallen 6.7 percent since June 2009. The cost of attending the average public university rose 5.4 percent this year.

Student loan debt recently passed $1 trillion. It’s now more than credit card debt. The average graduate of a four-year college owes $27,000.

College students don’t get much for their money. Nearly half learn next to nothing in their first two years; a third learn almost nothing in four, according to a report authored principally by Prof. Richard Arum of New York University.

“Students who say that college has not prepared them for the real world are largely right,” said Ann Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “The fundamental problem here is not debt, but a broken educational system that no longer insists on excellence.”

Or even adequacy. “A college degree nowadays doesn’t necessarily signal that its holder has any useful work skills,” said Charlotte Allen of the Manhattan Institute. …

WSJ OpEd on students who decide not to waste the money on an Ivy League diploma.

Daniel Schwartz could have attended an Ivy League school if he wanted to. He just doesn’t see the value.

Mr. Schwartz, 18 years old, was accepted at Cornell University but enrolled instead at City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College, which is free.

Mr. Schwartz says his family could have afforded Cornell’s tuition, with help from scholarships and loans. But he wants to be a doctor and thinks medical school, which could easily cost upward of $45,000 a year for a private institution, is a more important investment. It wasn’t “worth it to spend $50,000-plus a year for a bachelor’s degree,” he says.

As student-loan default rates climb and college graduates fail to land jobs, an increasing number of students are betting they can get just as far with a degree from a less-expensive school as they can with a diploma from an elite school—without having to take on debt.

More students are choosing lower-cost public colleges or commuting to schools from home to save on housing expenses. Twenty-two percent of students from families with annual household incomes above $100,000 attended public, two-year schools in the 2010-2011 academic year, up from 12% the previous year, according to a report from student-loan company Sallie Mae. …

The GOP looks to be backing into a nomination of Mitt Romney. John Tamny lists the negatives. Pickerhead is ready to settle for Romney. We just have to be sure to hold his feet to the fire. Kinda like in October 2005 when W nominated Harriet Miers to the Court. It took 24 days of a shitstorm and he withdrew her name. That’s what the internet does for us.

Presumed Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney is well known for his tendency to flip flop on issues, but as those are already well documented, it should simply be said that we should be more concerned when people’s views don’t change. If so, it suggests they’re not learning anything such that their views aren’t evolving.

Arguably the bigger problem with Romney is what he believes now, or at least what he claims to believe. It’s his existing views that are dangerous, so if Republican voters hand him the nomination and worse, he’s elected, further destruction of a limping GOP brand appears a near certainty.

To begin, rather than be realistic about what can be achieved even assuming a sympathetic House and Senate, Romney has devised a 160 page, 59-point plan to boost the U.S. economy. He fails there alone.

If we ignore for a moment what’s in his plan, economies aren’t living, breathing blobs that need to be tweaked by philosopher kings of the Romney variety. Instead, economies are nothing more than a collection of individuals producing in order to consume, delaying consumption in order to grow wealth through the provision of capital to others, and generally looking to offer the most value to others with an eye on getting the most value.

That being the case, Romney’s economic plan, if credible, would require all of one quarter of one page. …

WSJ OpEd has fun with the president’s campaigning for Jon Corzine.

Never mind Mr. Corzine’s 1% pedigree as a former Goldman Sachs chairman. Never mind how Mr. Corzine essentially bought himself a U.S. Senate seat, spending his personal Goldman Sachs loot in one of the most expensive senatorial races ever. Never mind the dough Mr. Corzine stuffed in Mr. Obama’s pocket.

Here’s what Mr. Obama said in October 2009 while stumping for Mr. Corzine’s re-election bid as the Democratic governor of New Jersey:

• “You’ve had an honorable man, a decent man, an honest man, at the helm of this state. … He’s fought for what matters to ordinary folks.”

• “People…say, ‘You know, I was saving up all my life. …. Suddenly, because of this financial crisis, I may have to go back to work.’ ”

• “Jon knows these are challenging times. This is why he got into public service. He didn’t do it for the paycheck.”

• “This crisis…came about because of the same theories, the same lax regulation, the same trickle-down economics that the other guy’s party has been peddling for years.”

• “Jon’s got the mop and he’s cleaning up after somebody else’s mess.” …

Andrew Malcolm with late-night.

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Mark Steyn follows the Occupy Oakland group.

Way back in 1968, after the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Mayor Daley declared that his forces were there to “preserve disorder.” I believe that was one of Hizzoner’s famous malapropisms. Forty-three years later, Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, and the Oakland City Council have made “preserving disorder” the official municipal policy. On Wednesday, the “Occupy Oakland” occupiers rampaged through the city, shutting down the nation’s fifth-busiest port, forcing stores to close, terrorizing those residents foolish enough to commit the reactionary crime of “shopping,” destroying ATMs, spraying the Christ the Light Cathedral with the insightful observation “F**k”, etc. And how did the Oakland City Council react? The following day they considered a resolution to express their support for “Occupy Oakland” and to call on the city administration to “collaborate with protesters.”

That’s “collaborate” in the Nazi-occupied France sense: the city’s feckless political class are collaborating with anarchists against the taxpayers who maintain them in their sinecures. They’re not the only ones. When the rumor spread that the Whole Foods store, of all unlikely corporate villains, had threatened to fire employees who participated in the protest, the Regional President David Lannon took to Facebook: “We totally support our Team Members participating in the General Strike today – rumors are false!” But, despite his “total support”, they trashed his store anyway, breaking windows and spray-painting walls. As The Oakland Tribune reported:

“A man who witnessed the Whole Foods attack, but asked not to be identified, said he was in the store buying an organic orange when the crowd arrived.”

There’s an epitaph for the republic if ever I heard one.

“The experience was surreal, the man said. ‘They were wearing masks. There was this whole mess of people, and no police here. That was weird.’”

No, it wasn’t. It was municipal policy. …

Debra Saunders lives down the road from Oakland.

… Oakland’s former Mayor (and now governor) Jerry Brown devoted his tenure to enticing 10,000 new residents to live downtown. Mayor Jean Quan has undone that good work: Who wants to buy a condo in the land of broken windows?

Oakland has thriving, top-rated restaurants. Who wants to dine out in a town littered with too much graffiti and too little police protection?

These demonstrations threaten to starve the goose that pays for precious city services.

Once people start believing that they’re part of an oppressed 99 percent, you never know where they’ll see the 1 percent. One parent told the Oakland Tribune that members of Oakland’s politically correct school board should consider themselves “on notice that they will be evicted from office in the next election for doing the dirty work of the 1 percent.”

Quan started last week with the apparent belief that if she could assure activists that she was as liberal as they are, Occupy Oaklanders might behave. Thus, as the general strike dawned, Quan issued assurances that the city would “maintain a minimal police presence.”  …

Neal Boortz reminds us Obama owns the Occupy creeps. 

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of this, but just on the off chance that some Democrat libs or progs might stumble onto Nealz Nuze, let’s remind everyone that this whole increasingly absurd and violent “occupy” movement belongs lock, stock and barrel to Barack Obama.  

 Barack Obama has spend years excoriating corporations.  Remember when he changed the standard term “business jet” to “corporate jet?”  Just part of his effort to demonize corporate America and to assign to evil corporations the blame for our current fiscal situation.  Now we have the occupiers bragging about their “anti-corporation” credentials.

Again, for years, Obama spoke of the evil of the 1% and the taxes they were paying (or not paying).   In the beginning Obama would simply say that the top 1% “needed” to pay “their fair share” of taxes.  Then, this year, he started flat-out stating that the top 1% “were not paying their fair share” of taxes.  Now we have the occupiers with their “we are the 99%” signs and chants.  

The more you listen the more you see that these useful idiots are merely repeating the very same things that Obama has been saying for much of his adult life.   They are Barry’s Kids … Obama’s Children.  He cannot escape them.

Toby Harnden opens a section here on Herman Cain.

… While decrying race-based politics, Cain has been happy to compare himself to Haagen Dazs black walnut ice cream, joke that he’s a “dark horse” or quip that his Secret Service codename should be “Cornbread”  . By Friday, a Cain Super PAC had cut a television ad entitled: “High-tech lynching”.

Just as Barack Obama’s race was a key part of his appeal in 2008, Cain is a more attractive candidate for Republicans because he is black. Obama’s supporters responded with fury and lobbed accusations of racism when their candidate came under legitimate attack from the Clintons. Cain backers have been similarly vehement.

Sexual allegations against a black man are rightly treated with great suspicion by many Americans because they play on the kind of fears and taboos examined in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird. With the case against him thin and the accusation so incendiary, Cain’s predicament is prompting more sympathy than opprobrium.

Those who leaked the details of the 1990s sexual harassment cases might have thought that they’d destroy Herman Cain and leave his campaign dangling from a tree. But, as befits this strange and unpredictable election campaign, a funny thing happened on the way to the lynching.

Norm Ornstein at AEI takes a negative view of Cain and the people around him.

The frenzy over allegations of sexual harassment against Herman Cain has obscured another scandal involving the candidate, what appears to be a blatantly illegal use of a non-profit organization to fund the initial stage of his campaign. Set up as a 501(c)3, the same kind of non-profit as charities, universities, and think tanks, Prosperity USA spent tens of thousands of dollars on campaign-related activities for Cain, according to investigative reporting by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Much of the money for Prosperity USA came from Americans for Prosperity, the activist conservative organization funded by the Koch Brothers. Prosperity USA was apparently the brainchild of Cain campaign impresario Mark Block, who had served as Wisconsin director of Americans for Prosperity. …

Ross Douthat has a thought about the reasons for the rise of someone like Herman Cain.

… In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks than lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world. (Or as Calvin Trillin put it in these pages, quoting a tweedy WASP waxing nostalgic for the days when Wall Street was dominated by his fellow bluebloods: “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”)

Inevitably, pride goeth before a fall. Robert McNamara and the Vietnam-era whiz kids thought they had reduced war to an exact science. Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin thought that they had done the same to global economics. The architects of the Iraq war thought that the American military could liberate the Middle East from the toils of history; the architects of the European Union thought that a common currency could do the same for Europe. And Jon Corzine thought that his investment acumen equipped him to turn a second-tier brokerage firm into the next Goldman Sachs, by leveraging big, betting big and waiting for the payoff.

What you see in today’s Republican primary campaign is a reaction to exactly these kinds of follies — a revolt against the ruling class that our meritocracy has forged, and a search for outsiders with thinner résumés but better instincts. …

Andrew Malcolm shares a story from his childhood.

In the days of my childhood, just before television, my father and I waited in a very long line on a very cold autumn Friday night outside an observatory in Cleveland. I grew up in the countryside, so black night skies full of countless twinkling pins of light were as much a part of life as trees and a family dog.

We had pilgrimaged into the city to shuffle slowly ahead in that line for a special occasion. The facility was opening its giant telescope to the public because one of the other planets called Saturn was unusually “close” to Earth.

It was a long shuffle though – my feet were very bored — down two sides of the block, along the sidewalk, up the steps, through the lobby, up more steps, around the giant telescope base and, one by one, up a few more metal steps to squit into the eyepiece.

Oh my God Almighty, there it was. …

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Charles Krauthammer asks and answers, “Who Lost Iraq?”

Barack Obama was a principled opponent of the Iraq war from its beginning. But when he became president in January 2009, he was handed a war that was won. The surge had succeeded. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had been routed, driven to humiliating defeat by an Anbar Awakening of Sunnis fighting side-by-side with the infidel Americans. Even more remarkably, the Shiite militias had been taken down, with U.S. backing, by the forces of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They crushed the Sadr militias from Basra to Sadr City.

Al-Qaeda decimated. A Shiite prime minister taking a decisively nationalist line. Iraqi Sunnis ready to integrate into a new national government. U.S. casualties at their lowest ebb in the entire war. Elections approaching. Obama was left with but a single task: Negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to reinforce these gains and create a strategic partnership with the Arab world’s only democracy.

He blew it. Negotiations, such as they were, finally collapsed last month. There is no agreement, no partnership. As of Dec. 31, the U.S. military presence in Iraq will be liquidated.

And it’s not as if that deadline snuck up on Obama. He had three years to prepare for it. …

More of this from Fred and Kim Kagan. 

Iran has just defeated the United States in Iraq.

The American withdrawal, which comes after the administration’s failure to secure a new agreement that would have allowed troops to remain in Iraq, won’t be good for ordinary Iraqis nor for the region. But it will unquestionably benefit Iran.

President Obama’s February 2009 speech at Camp Lejeune accurately defined the objectives of American policy in Iraq as being ”an Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.”  He then outlined how the U.S. would achieve that goal by working ”to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative, and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe-haven to terrorists.”

Despite recent administration claims to the contrary, Iraq today meets none of those conditions.  Its sovereignty is hollow because of the continued activities of Iranian-backed militias in its territory.  Its stability is fragile and perhaps ephemeral, since the fundamental disputes among ethnic and sectarian groups remain unresolved.  And it is not in any way self-reliant.  The Iraqi military cannot protect its borders, its airspace, or its territorial waters without foreign assistance.

While President Obama has clearly failed to achieve the goals for Iraq that he set five weeks after taking office, Iran, in contrast, is well on its way to achieving its strategic objectives. …

Meanwhile Andy Malcolm found our leader in Europe.

How dumb do they think we are back there in D.C.?

We have a Democratic president, who isn’t really in Washington (he’s over advising Europe on its debt crisis, if you can believe that). He’s been doing little else but fly around this country on Air Force One to the tune of $181,000 an hour.

By night, Obama typically holds fundraisers. By day, Obama gives another speech (“Thank you. Thank you. Please be seated”) allegedly to pressure Congress to pass that infamous jobs bill that was so urgent back in August that he went on vacation and didn’t deliver the address until a month later. …

Spengler writes on political polarization in our country.

Has America become irrational? Not since the 1930s have politics been so polarized, from the Tea Party movement on one side of the spectrum to the Occupy Wall Street protesters on the other. Why does the right object so vehemently to government spending? And why does the left attack private capital with parallel passion? The answer lies not in the American psyche, but in the statistics.

America is engaged in class war, but not of the sort one reads about in the mainstream press. The truly indigent – young African-American men, for example, most of whom are now unemployed – have little to do in this war. Large corporations for the most part are bystanders as well; they will make their peace with the victor. This is a war of survival between the productive middle class on one hand, and the dependents of the state on the other. …

… households that considered themselves comfortably middle class, and looked forward to a comfortable and secure retirement, find themselves on the edge of calamity. During the bubble years of 1998-2007, when America imported $6 trillion of overseas capital, the ride was easy.

When the whole world brought its savings to the United States, people of mediocre skills and slack work habits could afford big houses, expensive vacations, and (at taxpayer expense) generous pensions. Why Americans expected to live well indefinitely on the largesse of foreign investors is a question for the psychiatrists, not the economists.

The crisis has called into being a political movement of the exasperated middle class, namely the Tea Party. It has erased the image of the government unions as champions of progressive causes, and exposed them as an “aristocracy of labor” (in Marx’s phrase) parasitizing the public revenue.

The outcome inherently favors the Republicans. Debt – the catchall name for the crushing tax burden – has become a hot button issue even for many Democrats. But this election will be fought more desperately, and nastily, than any other that comes to mind during the past century. This is an existential struggle, a political war of survival for the American middle class. If the government unions go down in the fight, the Democratic Party of Barack Obama will cease to exist in its present form – and that would be a beneficial outcome for the United States.

Thomas Sowell has a go at Occupy WS.

In various cities across the country, mobs of mostly young, mostly incoherent, often noisy and sometimes violent demonstrators are making themselves a major nuisance.

Meanwhile, many in the media are practically gushing over these “protesters,” and giving them the free publicity they crave for themselves and their cause — whatever that is, beyond venting their emotions on television.

Members of the mobs apparently believe that other people, who are working while they are out trashing the streets, should be forced to subsidize their college education — and apparently the President of the United States thinks so too.

But if these loud mouths’ inability to put together a coherent line of thought is any indication of their education, the taxpayers should demand their money back for having that money wasted on them for years in the public schools.

Sloppy words and sloppy thinking often go together, both in the mobs and in the media that are covering them. …

Joel Kotkin says we need more babies.

The world’s population recently passed the 7 billion mark, and, of course, the news was greeted with hysteria and consternation in the media. “It’s not hard to be alarmed,” intoned National Geographic. “We should all be afraid, very afraid,” warned the Guardian.

To be sure, continued population increases, particularly in very poor countries, do threaten the world economy and environment — not to mention these countries’ own people. But overall the biggest demographic problem stems not from too many people but from too few babies.

This is no longer just a phenomenon in advanced countries. The global “birth dearth” has spread to developing nations as well. Nearly one-third of the 59 countries with “sub-replacement” fertility rates — those under 2.1 per woman — come from the ranks of developing countries. Several large and important emerging countries, including Iran, Brazil and China, have birthrates lower than the U.S.

In the short run this is good news. It gives these countries an opportunity to leverage their large, youthful workforce and declining percentage of children to drive economic growth. But over the next two or three decades — by 2030 in China’s case  – these economies will be forced to care for growing numbers of elderly and shrinking workforces. For the next generation of Chinese leaders, Deng Xiaoping’s rightful concern about overpopulation at the end of the Mao era will shift into a future of eldercare costs, shrinking domestic markets and labor shortages. …

More of this from Nicholas Eberstadt who speaking of Europe says;

… No plausible amount of self-imposed budget austerity, furthermore, is likely to save these existing arrangements for the future, for Europe’s welfare states are being fatally undone by her public in another arena: the crèche. “Sustainability” is the term of the decade among Europe’s cognoscenti: and European birth trends have made the continent’s magnificent edifices of entitlement arithmetically unsustainable.

Half a century ago, the 17 countries that currently comprise the Euro zone were bearing about 5 million children each year. In a pay-as-you-go welfare state, those babies are now men and women in the prime of their working lives, supporting the health and pension benefits of older (and smaller) cohorts that preceded them. (Today there are about 2.2 Western Europeans in their late 40s for each in his or her late 70s.)

Over the intervening decades, though, Europe’s birth totals have plunged—and although the Euro zone’s population is much larger now than it was in 1960, the region today registers 30 percent fewer births. Over that period, Europe’s childbearing patterns shifted into sustained sub-replacement fertility, and by 2009, the Euro zone was on a trajectory which, if continued, would portend a shrinking of each subsequent generation by about a quarter (absent compensatory immigration). …

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The Yid with Lid blog posts on what Bush understood about the Middle East that his successor does not.

It was just about three years ago that America elected a president who was going to repair our relationship that was that he was going to “repair” our relationship with the world (especially the Muslim world) after eight years of that “cowboy” George “W” Bush. But three years into the Obama Presidency, our “relationship repairer-in-chief” has increased the divide between  the US and the Muslim Middle East, while opening up a divide with Israel, a nation who continues to provide this country counter-terrorism, intelligence and technology useful in urban warfare.
After three years of a very slow learning curve there are still things about the Middle East that George Bush understood and Barack Obama doesn’t get.

King Abdullah of Jordan, a long-time ally of the US told the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth that Obama has a lot to learn about being an ally, and seemed to indicate that the United States is no longer trusted in the Muslim Middle East:

Weymouth: It is astounding that Tantawi [head of Egypt’s military ruling council] did not take President Obama’s call for hours the night the Israelis were trapped in their embassy in Egypt.

Abdullah:The feeling I got from the Egyptian leadership is that if they stick [their] necks out, they will just get lambasted like [former president Hosni] Mubarak did. So I think they are playing safe by just keeping their heads down, which I think .?.?. sometimes allows things to get out of control. .?.?. Tantawi thinks there is too much pressure on him. …

… Unlike Bush, Obama does not seem to understand the strategic value of our most solid ally in the Middle East. Even worse, he gives no support to Israel and instead sides with a Palestinian Government who does anything it can to avoid making peace. He bashes Israel but when the PA was not responding to Israel’s ten-month-long freeze on building within existing settlements he was silent; in October 2009, when the PA rejected Obama’s plea for intense talks to be held in Washington he was silent, and even last week when Mahmoud Abbas said I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I will never recognize the Jewishness of the state, or a ‘Jewish state,” Obama  is silent

It has been three years since Barack Obama was elected the president who was going to “repair” our relationship with the world, instead he has hurt our relationship with our strongest allies in the Muslim Middle East while attacking Israel, a strategic partner who has helped us with insights and technology to fight the war on terror.

Michael Rubin says the Kurds in Iraq have figured us out.

The Iraqi Kurds have prided themselves on being America’s allies throughout the Iraq war and its aftermath. Repeatedly, regional leader Masud Barzani? told visiting American generals and dignitaries that the Kurdish region was the most pro-American in Iraq.

The Kurdish authorities, however, have never made ideological alliances, but are the ultimate realists: Barzani forms partnerships with whomever he believes can most fulfill his own interests. With the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, it is clear that anyone with an ounce of self-preservation is rushing to cut deals with the Iran. After all, the most common Iranian influence theme, Iraqi politicians say, is that “You may like the Americans better, but we will always be your neighbors.” Hence, on October 29, Barzani traveled to Iran where, on Sunday, he warmly embraced both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. According to press reports, Barzani declared, “We will not forget the assistance of the Iranian people and government during the hard times passed by Iraq. To preserve our victory we need Iranian assistance and guidance….”

Everyone in the region knows that the way Iraqis negotiate is to state extreme positions as a deadline approaches, and then go behind closed doors in a smoke-filled room to hash out agreements. The Iranians often quip that they play chess while the Americans play checkers. No one expected Obama to forfeit before the game actually began. But, alas, now that he has done so, he will discover just how deeply he has lost Iraq and Iraqis.

David Harsanyi says if you want more equality, you need more capitalism.

… You will notice that the Occupy Wall Street crowds — and the progressives who support them — focus on bringing the wealthy down to earth rather than lifting the 99 percent. They have a nearly religious belief that too much wealth is fundamentally immoral and unhealthy for society. The economic systems they cheer on would coerce downward mobility for the sake of equality but ignore prosperity for the people they claim to represent.

If progressive were interested in mitigating inequality, they would support the dynamism of free markets to allow the merit of ideas, products and services to win the day rather than stifle companies and pick winners in the name of imagined “progress.” Yes, “too big to fail” means banks, but it also means union-backed bureaucracies, political parties, car companies and green energy — and more.

If they were interested in spreading wealth, they would support lifting barriers that inhibit markets and make life difficult for entrepreneurs and businesses rather than spreading the destructive notion that life can only be “fair” if we rely on dependency and entitlement and tear down those who have more.

A week ago, a great piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal with more background on the credsis. We continue to believe it is important to understand the origins of this crisis. Here we learn how middle management at Freddie Mac was pushing back against the lowering of standards.  

Occupy Wall Street is denouncing banks and Wall Street for “selling toxic mortgages” while “screwing investors and homeowners.” And the federal government recently announced it will be suing mortgage originators whose low-quality underwriting standards produced ballooning losses for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Have they fingered the right culprits?

There is no doubt that reductions in mortgage-underwriting standards were at the heart of the subprime crisis, and Fannie and Freddie’s losses reflect those declining standards. Yet the decline in underwriting standards was largely a response to mandates, beginning in the Clinton administration, that required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to steadily increase their mortgages or mortgage-backed securities that targeted low-income or minority borrowers and “underserved” locations.

The turning point was the spring and summer of 2004. Fannie and Freddie had kept their exposures low to loans made with little or no documentation (no-doc and low-doc loans), owing to their internal risk-management guidelines that limited such lending. In early 2004, however, senior management realized that the only way to meet the political mandates was to massively cut underwriting standards.

The risk managers complained, especially at Freddie Mac, as their emails to senior management show. They refused to endorse the move to no-docs and battled unsuccessfully against the reduced underwriting standards from April to September 2004. Here are some highlights: …

Streetwise Professor on Jon Corzine’s fall.

FCM, investment bank, primary dealer, and wanna be Goldman MF Global declared bankruptcy today.  As is typical with financial firms, the end came quickly.  The firm’s problems metastasized quickly last week.  Another quarterly loss, a ratings downgrade, and worries about losses on trades in European government bonds led to the typical downward spiral of lost funding and lost customers.  These firms are very fragile.  When they fall, they usually don’t get up.

Ironically, MF’s FCM operation was acquired from  . . . REFCO, which cratered almost exactly 6 years ago, in October, 2005.  Will anyone dare to take on this cursed franchise?

Piecing things together, I surmise that the firm bought about $6 billion in Italian and other southern Euro bonds and repo’d them out.  Due to the decline in the prices of these bonds, and the firm’s deteriorating financial condition, the repo counterparties demanded higher haircuts.  The firm couldn’t come up with the cash, and in desperation maxed out its credit lines.  But that couldn’t stop the hemorrhaging.

The most likely explanation for all this is that the firm was already foundering, and CEO John Corzine tried to gamble on resurrection by ramping up the risk.  As is so often the case, this more often results in a more rapid descent to financial hell than resurrection.

One major irony is that MF Global was pushing hard for low capital requirements for members of OTC derivative CCPs.  How’s that idea looking now, GiGi?

Especially since suspicions are rife that MF has misused segregated customer funds, presumably to keep the resurrection gamble going.  Reports state that the firm is stonewalling regulators on turning over records, and that about $300 million in customer funds are missing.  This is one of the most egregious things a brokerage firm can do.

This is already a major fall for former Goldman CEO, US senator, and NJ governor Corzine.  He is also a major Obama fundraiser, who is presumably now a Nonperson.  If the suspicions about misuse of customer funds prove true, major fall won’t even come close to describing what lies in store for Mr. Corzine.  He will long to be merely a Nonperson.

On the news Jon Corzine’s firm mixed customer and firm accounts, Contentions’ Seth Mandel says;

… Stanford business professor Darrell Duffie told Bloomberg: “It’s kind of considered the third rail of the brokerage industry that when you’re holding your customers’ funds in their names, you don’t touch them — even in an emergency situation when you’re running short of cash.”

It’s not only the third rail, it’s common sense. But an executive who has already bet many millions of his firm’s dollars on the prospect that President Obama was going to toss him a cushy federal appointment is probably not being too careful about other people’s money.

Corzine is one of the Obama re-election campaign’s major “bundlers,” and he hosted a fundraiser to shower the Obama campaign with Wall Street cash several months ago. One expects his federal appointment to be abandoned rather quickly now, and Corzine’s political future is probably over as well. Residents of New Jersey now have yet another reason to be happy they voted Corzine out of office in favor of Chris Christie in 2009. Corzine’s political career was devastating for the state. …

Michael Barone calls attention to an important vote on taxes in Colorado.

While Washington was transfixed by the evolving responses of Herman Cain to the unfolding sexual harassment story and the financial press was transfixed by the sudden decisions of the Greek government to hold a referendum on the current (evolving?) bailout settlement and to fire the heads of all the military services, Coloradans went to the polls and voted on Proposition 103, championed by Boulder state Senator Rollie Heath, which would have raised the state income tax from 4.63% to 5% and which was marketed as a way to aid teachers and kids. Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper, elected with 51% in 2010 against split opposition, stayed neutral. Voters weren’t: they voted 64%-36% against 103.

The county by county returns provide an interesting insight on which Democratic constituencies backed the tax increase. …

…Relevance for 2012? Well, Obama strategists have pointed to Colorado as the model for a state they hope to carry again–relatively high income, high education–and it voted 54%-45% for Obama in 2008. The results for the university towns and the skitopias bode well for him. The results from the rest of the state don’t.

In the above piece, Barone refers to a post by Megan McCardle that linked to a fascinating blog post on the two tiers of new elites in the country. That post was by Kenneth Anderson in Volokh Conspiracy. This wanders, but has the germs of interesting thoughts about the people involved in Occupy Wall Street.

Even more frightening is the young woman who graduated from UC Berkeley, wanting to work in “sustainable conservation.”  She is now raising chickens at home, dying wool and knitting knick-knacks to sell at craft fairs.  Her husband has been studying criminal justice and EMT — i.e., preparing to work for government in some of California’s hitherto most lucrative positions — but as those work possibilities have dried up, he is hedging with a (sensible) apprenticeship as an electrician.  These young people are looking at serious downward mobility, in income as well as status.  The prospects of the lower tier New Class semi-professionals are dissolving at an alarming rate.  Student loan debt is a large part of its problems, but that’s essentially a cost question accompanying a loss of demand for these professionals’ services.

The OWS protestors are a revolt — a shrill, cri-de-coeur wail at the betrayal of class solidarity — of the lower tier New Class against the upper tier New Class.  It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money.  It’s a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine.  The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well.  It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites.

The downward mobility is real, however, in both income and status.  The Cal graduate started out wanting to do “sustainable conservation.”  She is now engaged in something closer to subsistence farming.

Saturday night comes the biggest college football game of the year. Undefeated (#1) LSU travels to undefeated Alabama (#2). One month ago, the WSJ ran an article explaining how LSU had worked for a year to slim down their defense to prepare for Oregon who they defeated. While explaining the complexity of the Division One college game, the article closed with this caveat;

… When the Ducks (Oregon) met LSU, they faced a fitter, faster and, in some instances, smaller defense than they’d seen on tape. It was, in some ways, a perfect doppelganger of their offense. After taking down the Ducks 40-27, LSU has since run its record to 5-0 (Now 8-0) and ranks No. 5 in the country in total defense in terms of yards allowed per play (3.8), while playing four ranked opponents. Those whippet-strong linemen—Mingo, Montgomery and Logan—lead the team with 4.5 tackles for loss and two sacks apiece. And 5-foot-9 cornerback Tyrann Mathieu leads the team with four forced fumbles and 25 solo tackles. (It’s worth noting that Oregon has averaged 60.3 points in three wins since playing LSU.)

If there’s likely to be a reckoning for the skinnied-up Tigers defense, it might come on Nov. 5 when they head to Tuscaloosa to play Alabama. The Crimson Tide runs a conventional, pro-style offense from behind a jumbo-size line that averages 6 feet 4, 313 pounds. Those blockers, paired with 224-pound running back Trent Richardson, can make any defense look small.

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Today’s Pickings has just several items, two from the November issue of Commentary. They are a debate about what might be the future of our country. Mark Steyn starts with The Case for Pessimism.

In September 2009, Barack Obama and Muammar Qaddafi both addressed the United Nations. It is a pitiful reflection upon the Republic in twilight that, when it comes to the transnational mush drooled by the leader of the free world or the conspiracist ramblings of a pseudo-Bedouin terrorist drag queen presiding over a one-man psycho-cult basket case, it’s more or less a toss-up as to which of them was the more unreal.

Qaddafi spoke for 90 minutes, and in the midst of his torrent of words, his translator actually broke down and cried out, “I can’t take it anymore.” The colonel gravely informed the world body that the swine flu was a virus that had been created in a government laboratory, and he called for a UN inquiry into the Kennedy assassination on the grounds that Jack Ruby was an Israeli who killed Lee Harvey Oswald to stop the truth coming out about Kennedy being killed to prevent an investigation into the Zionist nuclear facility at Dimona.

On the other hand:

“I have been in office for just nine months, though some days it seems a lot longer,” President Obama mused. “I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are rooted, I believe, in a discontent with the status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences.”

Now, forget the first part, which was just Obama’s usual narcissistic “but enough about me; let’s talk about what the world thinks about me” shtick. It was the second part of Obama’s remarks that reveals the danger we find ourselves in, two years later, even with Qaddafi toppled and in hiding and Jack Ruby’s Israeli roots still unexplored.

The thing is, for better or worse, we are defined by our differences, and if Barack Obama didn’t understand that when he was at a podium addressing a room filled with representatives of Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Venezuela, and the whole gang of evil, the rest of the world certainly did as soon as Qaddafi appeared. Obama and Qaddafi may both have been the heads of state of sovereign nations, but if you’re on an Indian Ocean island when the next tsunami hits, try calling Libya instead of the United States for help and see where it gets you.

The global reach that enables America and a handful of other nations to get to a devastated backwater on the other side of the planet and save lives and restore the water supply in a matter of days isn’t a happy accident or a quirk of fate. It is something that derives explicitly from our political system, our economic liberty, our traditions of scientific and cultural innovation, and a general understanding that societies advance when their citizens are able to fulfill their potential in freedom.

In other words, America and Libya are defined by nothing but their differences, even though the very thought of “differences” seemed to pain the president on that day. “No nation,” he announced to the assembled warmongers and genociders, both actual and would-be, “can or should try to dominate another nation.”

As far as I’m aware, neither Obama’s translator nor anyone else screamed “I can’t take this anymore” and fled the room. But someone should have. Whether or not any nation should try to dominate another, they certainly can. And they have. Nations have sought to dominate others and have succeeded at it with ease all over the planet and throughout human history.

So who’s next? According to the International Monetary Fund, China will become the planet’s leading economy in the year 2016.

If the IMF is right, in five years’ time, the preeminent economic power on the planet will be a one-party state with a Communist Politburo and a largely peasant population, no genuine market, no human rights, no property rights, no rule of law, no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom of association. It will mark the end of a two-century Anglophone dominance, and—even more civilizationally startling—for the first time in a half millennium the leading economic power will be a country that doesn’t even use the Roman alphabet.

Whether or not this preeminent China should dominate other nations, it certainly can. And it certainly will.

If you think like President Obama and believe nations are not defined by their differences, then China’s great leap forward is not that big a deal. But if you think, like someone who has given it a moment’s thought, that nations are defined by their differences, it is a very big deal. Most immediately, it means that the fellow elected next November will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world’s leading economy. This should be a source of shame to every American. It is not. Not yet. Instead, we battle over trivialities. …

… In 1975, Milton Friedman said this: “I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”

Just so. Every time Barack Obama stands at his teleprompter and is forced to pretend that he’s interested in deficit reduction, we have taken a step toward that Milton Friedman reality. You have to create the conditions, as the Tea Party and the town hall meetings did, whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right things.

One cannot wait for the great leader to descend from the heavens to do the work for us. Every glamour boy, from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney to Rick Perry, proves to have feet of clay. It’s more important that tens of millions of ordinary citizens move the meter on public discourse and force the wrong people to do the right things.

But we don’t have much time to force them. If we don’t turn this thing around by mid-decade, if we let China become the dominant economic power in a world where the Iranians are nuclearizing and where Russia is making whatever mischief it can, we will see something new in world history. Something terrifying. This will not be like the transition from Britain to America, from a crucible of liberty to its greatest exponent. This will be the greatest step backwards for the civilization that built the modern world and spread its blessings across the map. There will be no new world order. There will be no world order.

The only way to prevent it is to act, and act quickly. Otherwise, it’s over. In 1969, in a poem about the end of the British empire called “Homage to a Government,” Philip Larkin? wrote: “Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home/For lack of money…/We want the money for ourselves at home/Instead of working.” The narrator keeps saying that “this is all right,” but he concludes with this: “The statues will be standing in the same/Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same./Our children will not know it’s a different country./All we can hope to leave them now is money.”

We Americans can’t even hope that. And our children will know their reduced America was not the America that should have been theirs by right.

John Podhoretz makes the case for optimism.

… If the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight wonderfully concentrates the mind, as Dr. Johnson said, the fortnight is about to begin. And for the first time, in 2011, politicians have begun to address the crisis seriously. House Republicans passed Rep. Paul Ryan’s revolutionary budget outline, which eliminates the Medicare entitlement in favor of a voucher system. And even Barack Obama is using the term “tax reform,” though he surely doesn’t mean by it what it really means—a radical simplification of the tax code that largely reverses the long trend toward using it as a means of designing a social order in keeping with the wants and interests of politicians.

The American people are already witness to one possible future now playing itself out in the implosion of Europe. That ongoing nightmare is providing hard evidence to anyone with eyes to see that the United States must take a different path in relation to government spending and conduct before it is too late. That is true not only of the entitlements but also the incentives that dominate the tax code, including the home-mortgage deduction; right and left are finding surprising common ground in the notion that these incentives are dangerous distortions, little more than corporate welfare that supports banks and energy producers and home builders as well. Reducing or eliminating them is the work of the next decade—complicated and grueling work that will require a complete restructuring of the tax code and an alteration in the very notion of a government “benefit,” how it is received, and how it is paid out.

The battles over all this will, to some extent, dominate our politics henceforward. We got a glimpse of the nature of the fight over the debt ceiling in July, and the 2012 election will pivot on it. I say “to some extent” because unexpected events, probably in the realm of foreign policy, will surely come along to complicate the picture. But when it comes to matters of their own fiscal health and the country’s, we can be confident in this: the American people have made rational choices in the past, and there is no reason to believe they will cease making rational choices in the future. And you don’t have to be all that much of an optimist to see that the choice between national suicide and national salvation isn’t really all that difficult.

Andrew Malcolm has late-night humor.