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James Pethokoukis with seven graphs that sum up the record of this administration.

My Magnificent Seven. Some bust myths. Others highlight a reality the media is ignoring. Enjoy!

1. The overly optimistic unemployment forecast of the Obama White House. This may be the most infamous economic prediction in U.S. political history (helpfully updated by The Right Sphere). For the original January 2009 chart from White House economic advisers Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer, see here.

2.  The real unemployment rate. The official (U-3) unemployment rate is 8.6 percent. But the labor force has been shrinking as discouraged workers have been disappeared by government statisticians rather than counted as unemployed. But what if they weren’t? What if the Labor Department added those folks back into the numbers? Well, you would get this: …

Jennifer Rubin cites the worst 12 political moves of the past year.

In 2011 we saw some impressive political moves. For example, Rep.Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) figured out how to make himself as the House Budget Committee chairman the chief opponent to President Obama on fiscal issues. But there were also some boneheaded plays. In the spirit of the holiday, I have 12 that stand out.

1. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) decides not to run for president. He would certainly be the front-runner by now and could very likely have galvanized disparate elements of the GOP.

2. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) decides to run for president.Lacking preparation, policy ideas and verbal skill, he soon crashed and burned as a candidate. Barring a miraculous comeback, he will have permanently harmed his political stature.

3. Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich decides to attack Mitt Romney on his Bain Capital experience. This may have been the key turning point in the race, when Gingrich lost support of many on the right and Romney stood up for free market capitalism. …

OK, so what do left-liberals think of the administration? Two Washington Post writers come up with a scathing report on the administration’s green investments.

Linda Sterio remembers the excitement when President Obama arrived at Solyndra last year and described how his administration’s financial support for the plant was helping create hundreds of jobs. The company’s prospects appeared unlimited as Solyndra executives described the backlog of orders for its solar panels.

Then came the August morning when Sterio heard a newscaster announce that more than a thousand Solyndra employees were out of work. Only recently did she learn that, within the Obama administration, the company’s potential collapse had long been discussed.

“It’s not about the people; it’s politics,” said Sterio, who remains jobless and at risk of losing her home. “We all feel betrayed.”

Since the failure of the company, Obama’s entire $80 billion clean-technology program has begun to look like a political liability for an administration about to enter a bruising reelection campaign.

Meant to create jobs and cut reliance on foreign oil, Obama’s green-technology program was infused with politics at every level, The Washington Post found in an analysis of thousands of memos, company records and internal ­e-mails. Political considerations were raised repeatedly by company investors, Energy Department bureaucrats and White House officials.

The records, some previously unreported, show that when warned that financial disaster might lie ahead, the administration remained steadfast in its support for Solyndra.

The documents reviewed by The Post, which began examining the clean-technology program a year ago, provide a detailed look inside the day-to-day workings of the upper levels of the Obama administration. They also give an unprecedented glimpse into high-level maneuvering by politically connected clean-technology investors.

They show that as Solyndra tottered, officials discussed the political fallout from its troubles, the “optics” in Washington and the impact that the company’s failure could have on the president’s prospects for a second term. Rarely, if ever, was there discussion of the impact that Solyndra’s collapse would have on laid-off workers or on the development of clean-energy technology.

“What’s so troubling is that politics seems to be the dominant factor,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “They’re not talking about what the taxpayers are losing; they’re not talking about the failure of the technology, whether we bet on the wrong horse. What they are talking about is ‘How are we going to manage this politically?’” …

And David Brooks thinks they need better historians.

The members of the Obama administration have many fine talents, but making adept historical analogies may not be among them.

When the administration came to office in the depths of the financial crisis, many of its leading figures concluded that the moment was analogous to the Great Depression. They read books about the New Deal and sought to learn from F.D.R.

But, in the 1930s, people genuinely looked to government to ease their fears and restore their confidence. Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.

According to a Gallup survey, 64 percent of Americans polled said they believed that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 26 percent believed that big business is the biggest threat. As a result, the public has reacted to Obama’s activism with fear and anxiety. The Democrats lost 63 House seats in the 2010 elections.

Members of the administration have now dropped the New Deal parallels. But they have started making analogies between this era and the progressive era around the turn of the 20th century.

Again, there are superficial similarities. Then, as now, we are seeing great concentrations of wealth, especially at the top. Then, as now, the professional class of lawyers, teachers and journalists seems to feel as if it has the upper hand in its status war against the business class of executives and financiers.

But these superficial similarities are outweighed by vast differences. …

Alana Goodman posts on Canada’s pipeline warnings.

The Obama administration has spent three years reviewing the Keystone XL pipeline, and the Canadian government is understandably frustrated that the decision has been kicked further down the road. After the White House insinuated earlier this week that it might reject the pipeline, Prime Minister Stephen Harper threatened to take the oil elsewhere (via HotAir):

Canada could sell its oil to China and other overseas markets with or without approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline in the United States, says Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

In a year-end television interview, Harper indicated he had doubts the $7-billion pipeline would receive political approval from U.S. President Barack Obama, and that Canada should be looking outside the United States for markets.

“I am very serious about selling our oil off this continent, selling our energy products off to Asia. I think we have to do that,” Harper said in the Monday interview with CTV National News?.

Right now, there’s no avenue for Canada to get the oil to the Pacific for shipping, so any deal with China would be far down the road.

Proposals to build a pipeline extension to reach Canada’s West Coast are also likely to get major pushback from environmentalists. But it is possible. At Huffington Post Canada, Christopher Sands explains:

Canada’s best move now would be to quietly build the pipeline to the West Coast, regardless of the outcome of the U.S. 2012 elections or the progress of Keystone XL construction. Canada needs real options to avoid being repeatedly held captive to American political caprice. To earn U.S. respect and stop the bullying by environmental groups and politicians, Canada must turn its Keystone threats into credible promises, and act on them when necessary.

This would be a major disappointment, but it would be hard to blame Canada for taking that route. Let’s say Obama gets reelected, and the Keystone XL decision comes due in 2013. There’s a good chance Obama will approve the pipeline once he’s free of reelection constraints, but it’s far from certain. Who knows what the political dynamic will be like in a year?

Robert Bradley in Forbes writes about the unlimited energy potential of North America. If only we had leadership in DC that would take advantage of it.  

The fossil-fuel energy era is not waning. Quite the opposite; it is still young.

For decades, activists have been trying to convince the American people that declining resources would forever make us dependent on expensive foreign oil. But according to a new report from the Institute for Energy Research (IER) on North America’s energy resources, that line of thinking is flat-out false. Based on the latest official statistics, domestic oil, natural gas, and coal deposits are much more extensive than commonly realized.

The real problem is that much of our resources are not being developed because of antiquated, heavy-handed government regulations. As a consequence, the American economy is being deprived of significant job creation and new investments.

Consider this. Total recoverable oil in North America exceeds 1.7 trillion barrels, which is more oil than the entire world has used over the last 150 years. And that amount alone could meet the energy needs of the United States for the next 250 years.

An estimated 1.4 trillion of those barrels are buried under American soil. For some perspective: the total proven reserves in Saudi Arabia is just about 260 billion barrels.

And even that 1.4 trillion figure might be an underestimation. Future technological innovation may well lead to improved detection techniques, helping us locate oil deposits currently uncovered. Or innovation could improve extraction techniques, enabling us to tap into reserves previously thought unreachable. …

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Corner post from Mark Steyn.

On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.

Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn’t conform to their dimwitted sappiness about “Facebook Revolutions”. It took a Jew to deliver this line:

When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi in England, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

More on the subject from David Warren.

When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi in England, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

This in turn was quoted in an excellent article in the Daily Telegraph this week. Fraser Nelson asked all the pertinent questions about the indifference displayed by the British Foreign Office to the persecution of Christians (along with other minorities) in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria; indeed, throughout the Middle East. Why do our diplomats refuse even to raise the issue with their counterparts in these countries?

The same could be asked of most western foreign ministries. Germany is an exception, and apparently Angela Merkel has, to her credit, interceded discreetly but forcefully to get some restrictions lifted on Catholics in Turkey. If Canada is doing something, it is even more discreet.

But of course, formal restrictions on Christian life and worship in Muslim countries – which would be considered outrageous if they were applied to Muslims in any western country – are endemic. They vary not so much in content, as in enforcement, and as a rule, become heavier when any society is in convulsion, lighter when it is not. In other words, Christians, formerly Jews (before their general exodus, when Israel was founded), and other minorities such as Shia Muslims in Sunni lands, are accustomed to becoming scapegoats when things having nothing to do with them go wrong.

And this is the case now. The “Arab Spring,” which was welcomed this year as an expression of “democracy” by the West’s political, media, and chattering classes, has brought social convulsion to one Arab state after another. Against the background of what is to my view instead a large catastrophe, Christian communities that have existed in each state since centuries before the arrival of Islam, are being eliminated. …

Air France Flight 447 that crashed in the South Atlantic two years ago has been the subject of two items from Der Spiegel in Pickings here and here. Now, cockpit conversations from the flight recorder have been translated and explained by Popular Mechanics.  

For more than two years, the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 over the mid-Atlantic in the early hours of June 1, 2009, remained one of aviation’s great mysteries. How could a technologically state-of-the art airliner simply vanish?

With the wreckage and flight-data recorders lost beneath 2 miles of ocean, experts were forced to speculate using the only data available: a cryptic set of communications beamed automatically from the aircraft to the airline’s maintenance center in France. As PM found in our cover story about the crash, published two years ago this month, the data implied that the plane had fallen afoul of a technical problem—the icing up of air-speed sensors—which in conjunction with severe weather led to a complex “error chain” that ended in a crash and the loss of 228 lives.

The matter might have rested there, were it not for the remarkable recovery of AF447′s black boxes this past April. Upon the analysis of their contents, the French accident investigation authority, the BEA, released a report in July that to a large extent verified the initial suppositions. An even fuller picture emerged with the publication of a book in French entitled Erreurs de Pilotage (volume 5), by pilot and aviation writer Jean-Pierre Otelli, which includes the full transcript of the pilots’ conversation.

We now understand that, indeed, AF447 passed into clouds associated with a large system of thunderstorms, its speed sensors became iced over, and the autopilot disengaged. In the ensuing confusion, the pilots lost control of the airplane because they reacted incorrectly to the loss of instrumentation and then seemed unable to comprehend the nature of the problems they had caused. Neither weather nor malfunction doomed AF447, nor a complex chain of error, but a simple but persistent mistake on the part of one of the pilots.

Human judgments, of course, are never made in a vacuum. Pilots are part of a complex system that can either increase or reduce the probability that they will make a mistake. After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit procedures can be modified all around the world so that no one will ever make this mistake again—or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome. After all, the men who crashed AF447 were three highly trained pilots flying for one of the most prestigious fleets in the world. If they could fly a perfectly good plane into the ocean, then what airline could plausibly say, “Our pilots would never do that”?

Here is a synopsis of what occurred during the course of the doomed airliner’s final few minutes.

At 1h 36m, the flight enters the outer extremities of a tropical storm system. Unlike other planes’ crews flying through the region, AF447′s flight crew has not changed the route to avoid the worst of the storms. The outside temperature is much warmer than forecast, preventing the still fuel-heavy aircraft from flying higher to avoid the effects of the weather. Instead, it ploughs into a layer of clouds.

At 1h51m, the cockpit becomes illuminated by a strange electrical phenomenon. The co-pilot in the right-hand seat, an inexperienced 32-year-old named Pierre-Cédric Bonin, asks, “What’s that?” The captain, Marc Dubois, a veteran with more than 11,000 hours of flight time, tells him it is St. Elmo’s fire, a phenomenon often found with thunderstorms at these latitudes.

At approximately 2 am, the other co-pilot, David Robert, returns to the cockpit after a rest break. At 37, Robert is both older and more experienced than Bonin, with more than double his colleague’s total flight hours. The head pilot gets up and gives him the left-hand seat. Despite the gap in seniority and experience, the captain leaves Bonin in charge of the controls.

At 2:02 am, the captain leaves the flight deck to take a nap. Within 15 minutes, everyone aboard the plane will be dead. …

… Today the Air France 447 transcripts yield information that may ensure that no airline pilot will ever again make the same mistakes. From now on, every airline pilot will no doubt think immediately of AF447 the instant a stall-warning alarm sounds at cruise altitude. Airlines around the world will change their training programs to enforce habits that might have saved the doomed airliner: paying closer attention to the weather and to what the planes around you are doing; explicitly clarifying who’s in charge when two co-pilots are alone in the cockpit; understanding the parameters of alternate law; and practicing hand-flying the airplane during all phases of flight.

But the crash raises the disturbing possibility that aviation may well long be plagued by a subtler menace, one that ironically springs from the never-ending quest to make flying safer. Over the decades, airliners have been built with increasingly automated flight-control functions. These have the potential to remove a great deal of uncertainty and danger from aviation. But they also remove important information from the attention of the flight crew. While the airplane’s avionics track crucial parameters such as location, speed, and heading, the human beings can pay attention to something else. But when trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land—the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what’s going on. They’ll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can’t be trusted? What’s the most pressing threat? What’s going on? Unfortunately, the vast majority of pilots will have little experience in finding the answers.

Michael Kinsley defends Wal-Mart.

In cultural commentary about the American economy, one company at a time always seems to be the goat. Everything it does is interpreted as evil. In the 1950s it was General Motors. GM’s CEO, Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson, became a national figure of ridicule for telling a congressional committee, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” Except that he actually said, “For years I thought that what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa” — which is quite a different proposition.

In the 1990s the goat was Microsoft.* That famous antitrust case looks a bit silly in retrospect, don’t you think? Turns out it wasn’t Microsoft that was about to take over the world: It was Google.

Who is the goat today? Clearly it’s Wal-Mart, with perhaps an honorable mention for Amazon. But Amazon has ardent fans as well as ardent enemies. Does anybody really love Wal-Mart? Well, I’m a pretty big fan. It’s fun to roam the aisles and see what people are buying. Nineteen-inch flat-screen TVs for $98! That’s pretty great, but I don’t need one.

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague at Bloomberg Jeff Goldberg launched a ferocious attack on Sam Walton’s daughter, Alice (net worth: $21 billion), for building a billion-dollar art museum in Bentonville, Ark., where Wal-Mart has its headquarters, and stocking it with American art. He calls it a “moral tragedy.” Why? Because Alice Walton’s money is tainted by its source: Wal-Mart.

What is Wal-Mart doing that is so wrong? …

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Mark Steyn wants the West to have some kids. 

… The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency – “America’s heading for the same fate as Greece if we don’t change course,” etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren – i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.

Look at it another way: Banks are a mechanism by which old people with capital lend to young people with energy and ideas. The Western world has now inverted the concept. If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars’ worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off? As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent’s economic “powerhouse” has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: one in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline, and some villages will simply disappear.” …

Andrew Malcolm hopes Iraq’s leaders don’t work like ours.

The politicians in Baghdad have in their own way been working hard at this democracy business, especially hard now that most U.S. troops are gone.

Iraq’s leaders have no doubt been monitoring CNN International in recent days as the needless payroll tax extension fight in that exotic place called Washington was settled, fell apart and now both houses of Congress have packed up without any agreement. As if another legislative month off was more important than the nation’s struggling economy.

They see this Democrat Harry Reid fellow saying no, absolutely no way will he name Senate conferees to work together with Republicans on a year-long tax cut extension, which he really wants, until the House passes a two-month extension, which Reid only says he wants. So, Reid the petulant politician closes the Senate.

And Iraqi leaders see the U.S. House not even voting on the two-month extension because its newest members want a year-long extension like everybody else and they also feel like needling their own sect leader a bit. So, they waste a vote demanding that the other chamber do what everyone knows it’s not going to do.

And they see the president of the United States, who wanted a year-long extension until he thought he got Republicans in a PR bind over two months, jabbering only at the GOP about its extraneous demands. …

AutoBlog tells how some union thugs got jailed.

Danny Douglas and Jay Campbell, have been sentenced to 18 months and 12 months plus one day, respectively, after being convicted of extortion. It seems the two former United Auto Workers officials agreed to end an 87-day strike at a GM plant in Pontiac, MI back in 1997 – but only after General Motors agreed to hire Campbell’s son and the son of another UAW official for high-paying jobs they were evidently not qualified for.

It’s been a rather long and winding road for Douglas and Campbell. According to the Detroit Free Press, the case first went to trial in 2002, and in 2003, the charges were dismissed by U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds. Shortly thereafter, a trio of judges from the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and reinstated the charges.

The maximum penalty allowed for the pair of law breakers – both are now 70 years old – was up to 30 years in prison and fines of $750,000. Judge Edmunds, however, sentenced them much less strictly, with six months of house arrest and two years of probation. Both Douglas and Campbell appealed the ruling, and the case went back to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

That was apparently a bad move on their part. Their convictions were upheld and the Sixth Circuit actually sent the case back to Judge Edmunds, ruling that her sentences were too lenient. So now, it’s off to prison for Douglas and Campbell.

OC Register editorial with a good example of why California is headed to the dumps. 

Democratic reaction to the news that Waste Connections, a $3.6-billion company and major Sacramento-area employer, is headed to Houston to seek a friendlier business climate tells other businesses all they need to know about the attitudes of those who run California’s government.

State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, gave these clueless and snarky remarks in response to the news: “In this instance you have a company that is, in fact, profitable, making significant revenue gains in 2011 and 2010. That doesn’t speak to a bad business climate here in California when a good company is able to thrive in that way. So whatever Mr. Middelstaedt’s (company CEO) reasons are to leave the great state of California, I know I’m pushing back.”

Steinberg claims to have worked on improving the state’s business climate, but from what we see in Sacramento, Steinberg and the party he helps lead have been pushing hard mainly for additional regulations and much higher taxes. The California Democratic Party’s attitude long has been that businesses are basically trying to rip off the public, and the source of all wealth and advancement can be found in the public sector, When businesses leave. Steinberg and Co. show little sympathy. …

Joel Kotkin says the rest of the sun belt is doing just fine.

Along with the oft-pronounced, desperately wished for death of the suburbs, no demographic narrative thrills the mainstream news media more than the decline of the Sun Belt, the country’s southern rim extending from the Carolinas to California. Since the housing bubble collapse in 2007, commentators have heralded “the end of the Sun Belt boom.”

Yet this assertion is largely exaggerated, particularly since the big brass buckle in the middle of the Sun Belt, Texas, has thrived throughout the recession. California, of course, has done far worse, but its slow population growth and harsh regulatory environment align it more with the Northeast than with its sunny neighbors.

Moreover, the Sun Belt is poised for a recovery, according to the most recent economic and demographic data. Even such hard-hit states as Arizona appear to be making an unexpected, and largely unheralded, recovery.

Take Florida. The Sunshine State may have experienced rapid population loss during 2008 and 2009, but the just-released 2011 Census estimates show a remarkable turnaround, with the state adding 119,000 domestic migrants last year. This may be less than half the gains in 2004 and 2005, when the in-migration reached nearly 250,000, but it is close to levels enjoyed a decade ago.

The big winners in terms of growth were in the South, with Texas, Florida and North Carolina as the leading in-migration states. Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia also ranked in the top 10. …

WSJ Editors say the SEC case against Fannie and Freddie execs provides some interesting and timely information.

Democrats have spent years arguing that private lenders created the housing boom and bust, and that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac merely came along for the ride. This was always a politically convenient fiction, and now thanks to the unlikely source of the Securities and Exchange Commission we have a trail of evidence showing how the failed mortgage giants turbocharged the crisis.

That’s the story revealed Friday by the SEC’s civil lawsuits against six former Fannie and Freddie executives, including a pair of CEOs. The SEC says the companies defrauded investors because they “knew and approved of misleading statements” about Fan and Fred’s exposure to subprime loans, and it chronicles their push to expand the business.

The executives deny the charges, and we hope they don’t settle. The case deserves to play out in court, so Americans can see in detail how Fan and Fred were central to the bubble. The lawsuits themselves, combined with information admitted as true by Fan and Fred in civil nonprosecution agreements with the SEC, are certainly illuminating.

The Beltway story of the crisis claims that Congress’s affordable housing mandates had nothing to do with it. But the SEC’s lawsuit shows that Fannie degraded its underwriting standards to increase its market share in subprime loans. According to the SEC suit, for instance, in 2006 Fannie Mae adjusted its widely used automated underwriting system, “Desktop Underwriter.” Fannie did so as part of its “Say Yes” strategy to “provide more ‘approve’ messages . . . for larger volumes of loans with lower FICO [credit] scores and higher LTVs [loan-to-value] than previously permitted.”  …

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Pickings today is devoted to the Spirit of Enterprise; the internal tug inside so many that created the economy of the world, and perhaps made us human.

We’ll be back after the holidays

WIRED interviews the author of a new book on the informal economy. One the “slumdog economist” suggests is over $10 trillion in size.

Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers. Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.

Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?

Robert Neuwirth: There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.

Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.

Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.

Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.

Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. …

The Wired piece was just published. Two months ago Robert Neuwirth wrote an article for Foreign Policy.

With only a mobile phone and a promise of money from his uncle, David Obi did something the Nigerian government has been trying to do for decades: He figured out how to bring electricity to the masses in Africa’s most populous country.

It wasn’t a matter of technology. David is not an inventor or an engineer, and his insights into his country’s electrical problems had nothing to do with fancy photovoltaics or turbines to harness the harmattan or any other alternative sources of energy. Instead, 7,000 miles from home, using a language he could hardly speak, he did what traders have always done: made a deal. He contracted with a Chinese firm near Guangzhou to produce small diesel-powered generators under his uncle’s brand name, Aakoo, and shipped them home to Nigeria, where power is often scarce. David’s deal, struck four years ago, was not massive — but it made a solid profit and put him on a strong footing for success as a transnational merchant. Like almost all the transactions between Nigerian traders and Chinese manufacturers, it was also sub rosa: under the radar, outside of the view or control of government, part of the unheralded alternative economic universe of System D.

You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe.

System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouillardise.” Or, sweetened for street use, “Systeme D.” This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.

I like the phrase. It has a carefree lilt and some friendly resonances. At the same time, it asserts an important truth: What happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, resilience, self-organization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of well-worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system.

It used to be that System D was small — a handful of market women selling a handful of shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies. It was the economy of desperation. But as trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too. Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world — close to 1.8 billion people — were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.

Kids selling lemonade from the sidewalk in front of their houses are part of System D. So are many of the vendors at stoop sales, flea markets, and swap meets. So are the workers who look for employment in the parking lots of Home Depot and Lowe’s throughout the United States. And it’s not only cash-in-hand labor. As with David Obi’s deal to bring generators from China to Nigeria, System D is multinational, moving all sorts of products — machinery, mobile phones, computers, and more — around the globe and creating international industries that help billions of people find jobs and services.

In many countries — particularly in the developing world — System D is growing faster than any other part of the economy, and it is an increasing force in world trade. …

… Joanne Saltzberg, who heads Women Entrepreneurs of Baltimore — a business development group — told me, we need to change our attitude and to salute the achievements of those who are engaged in this alternate economy. “We only revere success,” she said. “I don’t think we honor the struggle. People who have no access to business development resources. People who have to work two and three jobs just to survive. When you are struggling in this economy and still you commit yourself to having a better life, that’s really something to honor.”

At the end of this article there is a link to sixteen pictures of traders throughout the world. Welcome to Bazaaristan.

All of the above reminded Pickerhead of ”Years Off My Life” - the autobiography of a Soviet General – Aleksandr Gorbatov. It is an unvarnished tale that describes his time in the GULAG before he was rehabilitated on the eve of The Great Patriotic War. Gorbatov ended the war as the Soviet Commandant of Berlin and retired with four stars.

It is his youth that interests us today. Harrison Salisbury reviewed his book for the NY Times in 1965.

… But the finest quality of Gorbatov’s book is its sheer humanity. As he describes his life as a youngster – superstitious, religious, strong-willed, ambitious, clever – he sounds again and again like young Gorky. Russia was a hard school at the turn of the century, whether you were a youngster in Nizhni-Novgorod like Gorky, a miner’s apprentice in the Donbas like Khrushchev or a peasant’s son in the Palekh country. If you survived it you could survive almost anything …

At the age of eleven, after finishing his schooling, the young Gorbatov started a small trading business to help his family. It is that story you’ll see below.

An immigrant to our country from Russia asks who creates prosperity, governments or free people?

… The USSR lasted from 1917 to 1987. Despite the Russian population being very well-educated and everyone paying whatever government found to be “fair share” of their salaries, by 1987 the centrally managed economy was collapsing.

So what is it that drove American progress if, in the words of Obama, the free market “doesn’t work. It’s never worked”? Was America’s standard of living achieved due to individuals using their own capacities, in their own pursuits for happiness or success, unhindered by government control? Or was it thanks to government bureaucrats drawing up plans and managing the economy?

American progressives remind me of the top echelon of Soviet Communists: so confident in their condescension to people outside their circle, so in love with their rhetoric about fairness and the welfare of the masses, and so indifferent to the real fate of individual human beings.

Another Russian, Vasily Grossman, defines freedom in his book Forever Flowing.

“I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it’s a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes.” 

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Thomas Friedman tries to walk back his slurs against Israel and its supporters. Jonathan Tobin calls BS on him.

Last week, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman let his anger with Israel and its American supporters, including some Republican presidential candidates, get the better of him. In the course of a diatribe in which Friedman falsely claimed increasing numbers of American Jews were turning on Israel, he asserted that the ovations Congress gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” This invocation of the Walt-Mearsheimer canard about a Jewish conspiracy manipulating American foreign policy earned him the rebukes of even liberal Jewish groups who normally laud his every utterance. That has caused Friedman to backtrack on his slur, though only just a bit. In an interview with the New York Jewish Week’s Gary Rosenblatt, he said the following:

“In retrospect I probably should have used a more precise term like ‘engineered’ by the Israel lobby — a term that does not suggest grand conspiracy theories that I don’t subscribe to,” Friedman said. “It would have helped people focus on my argument, which I stand by 100 percent.”

But this weasel-worded attempt at walking back his brief foray into anti-Semitism shouldn’t convince anyone. There is no real difference between “engineered” and “bought and paid for.” Both terms seek to describe the across-the-board bi-partisan support for Israel that the ovations Netanyahu received as the result of Jewish manipulation, not a genuine and accurate reflection of American public opinion. …

Elliot Abrams writes on the subject in the Weekly Standard.

If you were an anti-Semite dedicated to spreading your hatred of Jews, what charges exactly would you make in 21st century America?

You would avoid the blood libel—too medieval to write of sacrificing Christian children to make Passover matzo.  That kind of stuff circulates in Arab lands or Pakistan, but won’t sell in suburban America.  And the “Christ-killer” material is also dated, what with Vatican II, Evangelical support for Israel, and the like.

There are two charges you would make. First, the rich Jews control our government. Second, those Jews are trying to push America into war so your sons will have to fight for Israel.

In the last week that is exactly what we have seen. First came the Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Perhaps it was jealousy from seeing Walt and Mearsheimer sell all those books with this line, but Friedman here tips right into the swamps.

And now we have Joe Klein, in Time magazine, in a section accurately entitled “Swampland”: …

Robert Samuelson suggests time has run our for the theories of John Maynard Keynes.

The eclipse of Keynesian economics proceeds. When Keynes wrote “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” in the mid-1930s, governments in most wealthy nations were relatively small and their debts modest. Deficit spending and pump priming were plausible responses to economic slumps. Now, huge governments are often saddled with massive debts. Standard Keynesian remedies for downturns — spend more and tax less — presume the willingness of bond markets to finance the resulting deficits at reasonable interest rates. If markets refuse, Keynesian policies won’t work.

Countries then lose control over their economies. They default on maturing debts or must be rescued with loans from friendly countries, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), government central banks (the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank) or someone. There are other reasons why Keynesian policies might fail or be weakened. But they pale by comparison with the potential veto now posed by bond markets. Ironically, the past overuse of deficits compromises their present utility to fight high unemployment.

There is no automatic tipping point beyond which a country’s debt — the sum of past annual deficits — causes bond markets to shut down. But Greece, Portugal and Ireland have already reached that point, with gross debt in 2011 equal to 166 percent, 106 percent and 109 percent of their national incomes (gross domestic product), according to IMF figures. Heavily indebted Italy and Spain could lose access to bond markets.

Thankfully, the United States is not now in this position. Interest rates on 10-year Treasury bonds hover around 2 percent; investors seem willing to lend against massive U.S. deficits. Just why is unclear. It’s not that U.S. budget discipline is noticeably superior. Economists Pedro Amaral and Margaret Jacobson of the Cleveland Federal Reserve recently compared U.S. budget performance against that of the weak European nations. …

James Pethokoukis marks the end of the year with the five worst economic ideas of the year. Then he suggests twelve policies that would help next year.

The longer the Great Stagnation/Long Recession/New Normal continues, the greater the risk that some profoundly terrible ideas — spawned by economic desperation and political opportunism – will pop up, gain a foothold and start to spread. Indeed, the past twelve months evidence the risk of a devastating policy error by Washington is escalating.

Here are the worst economic ideas of 2011, in reverse order: …

… 1. The Occupy movement. An obsession over income inequality runs through this entire list. And Occupy Wherever – so praised and embraced by Elizabeth Warren and Obama and the MSM — is a big reason why. But what would the rabble — a  mix of communists, union pros, the mentally deranged, and a few truly heartbreaking stories — have us do? Time travel so as to prevent the microchip revolution and reinstate command-and-control economies in Asia? Sadly — and tellingly — the protesters haven’t uttered a peep about teachers unions or Hollywood. Just the banks.

Please. What we should be focusing on is a) the level of income mobility in society and b) the absolute income gains of the broad middle. Income inequality zoomed in the late 1990s but since incomes were rising broadly, no one much cared if the rich got richer even faster. Everybody was winning. There was no Occupy Silicon Valley back then, despite the fantastic northern California weather.

Occupy and its fellow travelers have no apparent interest in advocating policies that would boost innovation and growth and incomes. But I do. So here are 12 ideas for 2012, some of which I gleaned from two of this year’s best economic policy books, Race Against the Machines and Launching the Innovation Renaissance:

1. Pay teachers more but get rid of tenure so the bottom five percent of teachers can be replaced by even average ones.

Nile Gardiner has fun with Joe Biden’s embarrassing prescriptions for Europe.

Joe Biden has caused a bit of a stir this week with his bizarre suggestion that “the Taliban per se is not our enemy”, just a decade on from the 9/11 attacks, carried out by al-Qaeda, and aided and abetted in Afghanistan by none other than the Taliban. The comments formed part of a wider interview on foreign policy given by Biden to Leslie Gelb of Newsweek. The stupidity of the vice president’s remarks on the war in Afghanistan were matched only by his reckless, almost surreal advice on the European financial crisis, which is so out of touch with reality that I doubt even the delusional Herman Van Rompuy would agree with him. Joe Biden’s solution for the EU’s massive debt crisis? A mammoth Obama-style bailout across the Atlantic, but this time in euros not dollars: …

… Fortunately, as I’ve noted previously, the views of the Obama administration, with its history of economic failure, have become an irrelevance on the EU crisis. After all, the US administration’s $787 billion taxpayer-funded “stimulus” was a failure, notable largely for its contribution to fueling the biggest budget deficit since World War Two. With their track record, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are probably the last two leaders on earth to be giving advice on a debt crisis issue, and the message coming from Washington is clearly the wrong one. The best thing that European leaders can do is to study the economic policies of the Obama presidency and do exactly the opposite, by cutting spending, ending excessive borrowing, slashing the size of the public sector, lowering taxes, freeing businesses from red tape, and taking a huge axe to big government.

WSJ Editors closely examined the EPA’s complaints about Wyoming drinking water and natural gas fracking.

… the EPA’s credibility is also open to review. The agency is dominated by anticarbon true believers, and the Obama Administration has waged a campaign to raise the price and limit the production of fossil fuels.

Natural gas carries a smaller carbon footprint than coal or oil, and greens once endorsed it as an alternative to coal and nuclear power. But as the shale gas revolution has advanced, greens are worried that plentiful natural gas will price wind and solar even further out of the market. This could mean many more of the White House’s subsidized investments will go belly up like Solyndra.

The other big issue is regulatory control. Hydraulic fracturing isn’t regulated by the EPA, and in 2005 Congress reaffirmed that it did not want the EPA to do so under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The states regulate gas drilling, and by and large they have done the job well. Texas and Florida adopted rules last week that followed other states in requiring companies to disclose their fracking chemicals.

But the EPA wants to muscle in, and its Wyoming study will help in that campaign. The agency is already preparing to promulgate new rules regulating fracking next year. North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple says that new EPA rules restricting fracking “would have a huge economic impact on our state’s energy development. We believe strongly this should be regulated by the states.” Some 3,000 wells in the vast Bakken shale in North Dakota use fracking.

By all means take threats to drinking water seriously. But we also need to be sure that regulators aren’t spreading needless fears so they can enhance their own power while pursuing an ideological agenda.

Michael Barone posts on the pipeline blunder.

How misguided was Barack Obama’s decision to refuse to approve the Keystone XL pipeline?

How misguided was Custer’s decision to ride into Little Big Horn?

Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that Americans favor building the Keystone XL pipeline by a 60%-24% margin. The fact that only 16% are unsure represents a very high level of knowledge about a project that was largely unknown except to readers of the oil and gas trade press a few months ago. And why shouldn’t Americans favor a pipeline that allows us to import oil from friendly nearby Canada rather than from unfriendly Venezuela or distant and dicey Saudi Arabia? …

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Caroline Glick writes on Tom Friedman.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman balanced his substantively anti-Israel positions with repeated protestations of love for Israel.

His balancing act ended last week when he employed traditional anti-Semitic slurs to dismiss the authenticity of substantive American support for Israel.

Channeling the longstanding anti-Semitic charge that Jewish money buys support for power-hungry Jews best expressed in the forged 19th century Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in John Mearshimer’s and Stephen Walt’s 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Friedman denied the significance of the US Congress’s overwhelming support for Israel.

As he put it, “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

It would be nice if Friedman is forced to pay some sort of price for finally coming out of the closet as a dyed-in-the-wool Israel hater. But he probably won’t. As he made clear in his column, he isn’t writing for the general public, but for a very small, select group of elitist leftists. These are the only people who matter to Friedman. And they matter to him because they share his opinions and his goal of indoctrinating young people to adopt his pathologically hostile views about Israel and his contempt for the American public that supports it.

It doesn’t matter to Friedman that overwhelming survey evidence, amassed over decades, show that the vast majority of the American public and the American Jewish community support Israel. It doesn’t matter to him that the support shown to Netanyahu in Congress last May was a reflection of that support.

As he put it, “The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away.”

Embedded in this statement are two key points. First, Friedman assesses that the prevailing view on US college campuses are his own radical views. And he is convinced that college students share his views. …

… On December 7 Politico’s Ben Smith published a detailed report about how two of the Democratic Party’s core institutions, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters are waging a concerted, continuous campaign to diminish left wing Democratic support for Israel. Media Matters official M.J. Rosenberg acknowledged that given the depth of popular support for Israel in the US, chances are remote that their efforts will pay off in Congress today. He explained that his goal is to shift the Democratic Party’s position on Israel through its younger generation.

As he put it, “We’re playing the long game here.”

Happily, to date, they are losing the long game as well as the short game both in Israel and the US. While it is important to remain on guard against radicals like Friedman and Rosenberg and their fellow travelers on campuses, it is also important to recognize that despite their powerful positions, they remain marginal voices in both Israel and the US.

Six and a half years ago George Bush spoke the truth about North Korea. Christopher Hitchens paid tribute to him in a May 2005 column for Slate.

How extraordinary it is, when you give it a moment’s thought, that it was only last week that an American president officially spoke the obvious truth about North Korea. In point of fact, Mr. Bush rather understated matters when he said that Kim Jong-il’s government runs “concentration camps.” It would be truer to say that the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, as it calls itself, is a concentration camp. It would be even more accurate to say, in American idiom, that North Korea is a slave state.

This way of phrasing it would not have the legal implication that the use of the word “genocide” has. To call a set of actions “genocidal,” as in the case of Darfur, is to invoke legal consequences that are entailed by the U.N.’s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. However, to call a country a slave state is to set another process in motion: that strange business that we might call the working of the American conscience.

It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the “slavery” of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves “captive.” The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. …

James Pethokoukis wonders what a Korean unification might cost.

The death of Kim Jong-il, the monstrous, madman dictator of hostage nation North Korea, creates tremendous uncertainty and risk for the region. Yet one scenario, however optimistic, would be that somehow this event puts North and South on the road to reunification. What might that cost? Well, Germany has paid some $2 trillion over two decades to reunify East and West. But keep in mind that East Germany was only a fourth the size of North Korea. And much richer, relatively. In 1989, East German per capita income was a third of the West’s. The situation in Korea is much different, as this analysis from the Atlantic Council sums up: …

Nile Gardiner writes on the president’s $4,000,000 Christmas vacation.

Around $4 million (£2.6 million) – the expected total cost to the US taxpayer of the Obama Christmas family vacation to Hawaii according to the Hawaii Reporter (hat tip: Rob Bluey at The Foundry). This is an astonishing amount of public money to be spending in an age of austerity – when the president is supposed to be leading efforts to cut the US budget deficit, the largest since World War Two, and a towering $15 trillion national debt:

Hawaii Reporter research shows the total cost for the President’s visit for taxpayers far exceeded $1.5 million in 2010 – but is even more costly this year because he extended his vacation by three days and the cost for Air Force One travel has jumped since last assessed in 2000. In addition, Hawaii Reporter was able to obtain more specifics about the executive expenditures.

The total cost (based on what is known) for the 17-day vacation roundtrip vacation to Hawaii for the President, his family and staff has climbed to more than $4 million.

This $4 million figure is nearly 100 times the average annual salary of an American worker, which currently stands at $41,673. The Hawaii Reporter calculates that travel costs alone for the president and his entourage via Air Force One (plus a separate trip for Michelle Obama who has traveled in advance), in addition to a United States Air Force C-17 cargo aircraft to transport “the presidential limos, helicopters and other support equipment”, amounts to a whopping $3,629,622. Housing for security staff costs an estimated $151,200, and luxurious hotel rooms for the president’s 24-strong staff a further $72,216. Based on these figures the total cost to the federal US taxpayer (and the additional burden on the national debt) is a staggering $3,853,038. If you add in local taxpayer costs of $260,000 (including police overtime and city ambulances), the total public expense is $4,113,038. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Conan: Newt Gingrich has issued a statement promising that he will not cheat on his wife. Even better, he said he wouldn’t cheat on his next wife either.

Leno: Obama says he didn’t know how bad the economy was when he took office. If it doesn’t improve soon, the next president will be saying the same thing.

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Charles Krauthammer answers the president’s bin Laden bragging by showing his appeasement of Russia and Iran.

… Barack Obama didn’t appease Osama bin Laden. He killed him. And for ordering the raid and taking the risk, Obama deserves credit. Credit for decisiveness and political courage.

However, the bin Laden case was no test of policy. No serious person of either party ever suggested negotiation or concession. Obama demonstrated decisiveness, but forgoing a non-option says nothing about the soundness of one’s foreign policy. That comes into play when there are choices to be made.

And here the story is different. Take Obama’s two major foreign policy initiatives — toward Russia and Iran.

The administration came into office determined to warm relations with Russia. It was called “reset,” an antidote to the “dangerous drift” (Vice President Biden’s phrase) in relations during the Bush years.

In fact, Bush’s increasing coolness toward Russia was grounded in certain unpleasant realities: growing Kremlin authoritarianism that was systematically dismantling a fledgling democracy; naked aggression against a small, vulnerable, pro-American state (Georgia); the drive to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence in the near-abroad and; support, from Syria to Venezuela, of the world’s more ostentatiously anti-American regimes.

Unmoored from such inconvenient realities, Obama went about his reset. The signature decision was the abrupt cancellation of a Polish- and Czech-based U.S. missile defense system bitterly opposed by Moscow.

The cancellation deeply undercut two very pro-American allies who had aligned themselves with Washington in the face of both Russian threats and popular unease. Obama not only left them twisting in the wind, he showed the world that the Central Europeans’ hard-won independence was only partial and tentative. With American acquiescence, their ostensibly sovereign decisions were subject to a Russian veto. …

In honor of our bug-out we have three posts by Max Boot on events in Iraq. Here’s most of one. 

Those were some pretty astonishing statements that President Obama made after his meeting in Washington with Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq: He said that “what we have now achieved is an Iraq that is self-governing, that is inclusive and that has enormous potential.”

Only the last part of that sentence is true: Iraq does have “enormous potential”–both good and bad. It could become another opulent petrostate–or it could revert to a hellish state of civil war. Either is possible at this point because Iraq is only barely “self-governing” and its government is acting in ways that are less “inclusive” all the time–witness Maliki’s arrest of more than 600 people on vague charges of “Baathism.”

Obama’s happy talk is seriously at odds with reality–and I’m sure Obama knows it. He is only attempting to put his abandonment of Iraq in the best possible light.

In the process he is taking an enormous gamble, not only with the security of Iraq, the United States, and the entire Middle East but also with his own historical reputation. True, the pullout from Iraq is popular today. It won’t be so popular a year or two from now if the result of the U.S. pullout is greater instability or tyranny. Obama will then shoulder the bulk of the blame for messing up the end game of a war that he never supported. …

Bart Hinkle found some hypocrites in Fairfax County.

You can’t get a whole lot more Democratic than Fairfax County, just outside of D.C. Barack Obama carried Fairfax 60-38 against John McCain in 2008. That’s 6 percentage points higher than Obama’s statewide margin, which Fairfax helped inflate because it is the commonwealth’s largest locality: 13.5 percent of Virginians live there. Four years before, George W. Bush carried Virginia with 54 percent of the vote — but not Fairfax, where John Kerry got 53 percent.

The county board of supervisors reflects the split as well. Seven of the 10 members are Democrats. That makes its recent stance on state government rather amusing.

Each year localities around Virginia draw up their wish lists for the General Assembly session that convenes in January. Virginia is a Dillon Rule state, which means that localities are under the thumb of state government and must go hat in hand to the legislature to get permission to do many things. Fairfax recently completed its wish list for the 2012 session.

And what do the supervisors want from Richmond? “I think the simple message is, ‘Please try to leave us alone,’ ” says Supervisor Jeff McKay.

How very tea party of them. Perhaps Fairfax should replace its county seal with the Gadsden flag — that yellow banner, popular at tea party rallies, with the coiled snake and the legend, “Don’t Tread on Me.” …

… In the eyes of contemporary liberalism everyday Americans need the firm guidance of their liberal betters lest they make poor choices or, through their choices, produce results liberals dislike, such as unbridled commerce or economic disparity.

Americans, say liberals, cannot be left to their own devices. So it is entertaining to watch a locality where such an ideology defines the political center – Fairfax is a bedroom community for federal bureaucrats – chafe under the very sort of paternalism it otherwise endorses.

There’s a lesson in that. Even people who benefit from big government love it less when they have to live under it.

Now that we are heading to energy independence, the liberal left is attacking natural gas; the fuel they used to love. Their real goal is for our country to be weak. American.com has the story.  

Just a few years ago, the liberal Pew Center of Global Climate Change, among many environmental groups, was heralding natural gas as a “bridge fuel to a more climate friendly energy supply”—an interim step on the transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar. Now, “progressive” environmental groups demonize natural gas, and shale gas in particular, as a “bridge to nowhere.” What’s the real story behind the flip-flop?

An investigative piece in Ethical Corporation magazine, “Who Blew Up the ‘Bridge to the Future,’” examines the troubling truth behind the turnaround. …

… The most intriguing question lying ahead is whether politics—the ideological forces lining up against unconventional sources of natural gas—will trump the science. Anti-shale gas advocacy groups are forging bizarre alliances, including with the Russians and the Iranians who thought they were going to corner the gas market in the coming decades.

That won’t change the facts in the ground. Natural gas is no longer the bridge to the future. It IS the future—unless “progressives” kill it.

Indulging in some over-the-top hyperbole, Richard Salsman points out that “takers” like Gingrich and Obama are attacking the “maker” Romney.

Despite decades of economic experience and personal familiarity with the logic of market exchange, many people today still sympathize with the myth that free markets left to their own devices are prone to periodic “failures,” breakdowns, or crises, while government intervention, money-printing, and wealth redistribution allegedly “stimulate” an economy or “smooth” the business cycle. Few myths are more harmful, since the precise opposite is true: markets left free (while operating under the rule of law) work very well and create vast wealth, while state spending, taxing, regulating, borrowing and inflating only usurp economic vitality.

A simple and memorable way to keep straight the crucial distinction between “economic power” (the power to produce) and “political power” (the power to coerce) is by a terminological duality – “makers” versus takers” – as incorporated in Edmund Contoski’s 1997 book. Despite persistent Marxist claims dating as far back as 1848, these two powers (the economic and political) are in no way synonymous. Indeed, they’re antonymous.

Economic power is creative, productive, and voluntary; it offers incentives, gains, rewards. Political power is destructive and involuntary; you must obey it, for it imposes punishments, losses, and penalties. This is no brief for anarchy, as many libertarians insist; it’s a case for government limited constitutionally to undertaking its only valid purpose – the protection of individual rights (including property rights) against the initiation of force or fraud (whether from home or abroad) – and whose power is limited to penalizing, incarcerating or destroying real criminals (those who rape, rob, pillage, kill, or defraud), not market makers. …

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Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard with a nice send off for Christopher Hitchens.

No secrets are being divulged when I report that Christopher Hitchens liked a drink every now and then. Preferably now. He wasn’t sloppy about it. In fact, he always seemed in perfect control. (I once saw him steer a beach bike through the streets of Key West without spilling his Scotch.) He just liked to keep the machine well-oiled so he could get on to more important things, like liberating oppressed peoples of the world, knocking out his 1,000 words a day, or starting fights with God, assuming there is one, which he didn’t. In some ways, his affection for drink brought us together, setting in motion my most vivid memories of him.

As the Iraq War kicked off in 2003, I was holed up in the Kuwait City Hilton—home to unembedded reporters looking to make their way in. While I’d only briefly met Hitchens once before, word had spread through mutual friends that my hotel room was the last cantina in town. Since the border being sealed meant the black market hooch supply had dried up, we smuggled our amber past customs officials in Listerine bottles. So when Hitchens showed up at my door early one morning kitted for battle with nothing more than his black leather jacket, blue jeans, and a half-smoked pack of Rothman’s (he refused to bring Kevlar, saying it made him feel  “like a counterfeit”), I offered him a welcome-to-the-war shot of “Listerine,” just to be hospitable.

“I don’t usually start this early,” he said, his glass already gratefully extended, “but holding yourself to a drinking schedule is always the first sign of alcoholism.”  …

We start an extended section on Obama’s re-elect chances with an article in the National Journal by Ron Brownstein. To be fair we start with a center left publication.

There’s an ominous trend for President Obama in the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll: not only is his overall approval rating lagging, but he’s lost as much (or even more) ground among groups that favored him in 2008 as among those who resisted him last time.

The chart at left compares Obama’s vote among key groups in 2008, according to exit polls, and his job approval rating among them in the latest Heartland Monitor released Thursday morning. (The survey, conducted by FTI Strategic Communications, polled 1200 adults by landline telephone and cell phone from November 30 to December 4 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.)

Overall, Obama has slipped from 52.8 percent of the vote in 2008 to 44 percent approval in the new survey with 49 percent disapproving. As the chart shows, Obama has declined not only in the groups that were always dubious of him, but also with several that enthusiastically joined his winning 2008 majority.

In 2008, Obama assembled what I called a “coalition of the ascendant” – by which I meant he did best among groups that were themselves growing rapidly in society, particularly minorities, the vast Millennial Generation, and the growing ranks of college-educated whites, especially women. Several of those groups have noticeably cooled on him. Obama’s approval rating is now 12 percentage points lower than his 2008 share of the vote among young adults (aged 18-29); 11 points lower among African-Americans; and 10 points lower among college-educated white women. …

Chris Stirewalt of Fox News reports on polls that attend to states, not groups.

In the dozen swing states where voters will decide the 2012 presidential election, a new Gallup/USA Today poll shows President Obama losing to the current Republican frontrunners by significant margins.

Obama trailed Mitt Romney by 5 points, 43 percent to 48 percent and trailed Newt Gingrich by 3 points, 45 percent to 48 percent, in the survey of these 12 battleground states

It’s a pretty big deal.

While Obama continues to tie or lead national polls, his performance in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin matters more. And there, things are not so good for the incumbent.

Part of the gap with the national numbers can be explained by the fractious, boom-and-bust Republican nominating process. While the overwhelming number of Democrats in deep-blue states already know who their nominee will be next year, Republicans are still squabbling amongst themselves in bright-red states like Georgia and Texas. That will change after there is a nominee and the national number for the GOP standard bearer will even out.

But the biggest problem for Obama is that he is underperforming his national number by so much in the swing states. Compared to his national number, his score falls by 4 points against Gingrich and 5 points against Romney. While Obama believes he can drive down the support for whoever the Republican nominee may be, it seems unlikely that he can get his own numbers up very much. …

James Pethokoukis graphically illustrates Obama’s troubles.

And Reuters notes a Harvard poll showing re-elect problems.

… Harvard surveyed voters age 18 to 29, a group known as Millennials because many were born just before the turn of the millennium in 2000.

They supported Obama over a generic Republican candidate by 6 percentage points. His margin widened to about 11 percentage points if he faces Romney in a general election and to 16 percentage points if his opponent is Gingrich or Texas Governor Rick Perry, the survey said.

But 18 to 29-year-olds have become disillusioned with his job performance, the survey showed. Some 36 percent predict Obama will lose reelection, 30 percent said he will win and 32 percent are unsure.

Less than half of those polled approve of the job Obama is doing and their view of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress is slipping as well, according to the survey.

Only 12 percent of young Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction and less than one-third of those polled approve of the way Obama is managing the economy, results showed.

The web-based survey of 2,028 U.S. citizens age 18 to 29 was conducted between November 23 and December 3. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. …

Switching subjects, Pethokoukis quotes a FT article on problems in our economy.

1. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, 450,000-550,000 new businesses with at least one employee were created in the US each year. In 2009, the latest year for which records are available, there were just 400,000.

2. More recent numbers suggest that the climate has not improved: the number of incorporated self-employed people, a measure of the health of small businesses, was 5.06m in November, down from 5.37m in November 2009, official figures say.

3. As the rate of new company formation has been slowing, the number of jobs created by each start-up has been falling too – again a trend that began well before the start of the recession. The result is that the total number of jobs created by start-ups, which had been running at 3m-3.5m per year, dropped to just 2.3m in 2009.

4.  For most of the 1990s, job creation ran at about 8 percent of employment, with job destruction a little lower at about 7.5 per cent, as the total number of people in work rose. Starting in about 2000, both job creation and destruction began to drift downwards, and carried on falling even as employment recovered after the 2000-01 recession. Job destruction has fallen and is now well below its rate in the 1990s, when the economy was much stronger. Job creation, however, also remains very weak, at only about 6.5 percent of employment. That statistic is the immediate cause of America’s persistently high unemployment.

Spengler catches Tom Friedman looking particularly stupid. We quote from this extensively since it hits the nail on the head when it comes to American universities.

That Thomas Friedman would spout stupidity and anti-Semitism surprises me no more than the appearance of a gumball after I put a quarter into the machine and turn the knob. But one line in the New York Times’ calumnist’s (sic) Dec. 13 tantrum against Israel was worth a double-take:

“I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused.”

Why on earth is the “real test” at the University of Wisconsin? For liberals, the only people who count are the smart people, because it is an article of faith that  social engineering can fix all the world’s problems, and a logical conclusion that only smart people qualify as social engineers. It doesn’t matter what the dumb people think. They are the ones who need to be socially engineered. To Friedman, it is irrelevant whether Americans at large support Israel by a 4:1 margin or better, and that support for Israel is growing steadily, as the Gallup Poll consistently shows:

That poll includes dumb people, so it doesn’t count. To Friedman, what matters is what university audiences might think. …

… The American university system exists for the most part to produce the social engineers who will fix all the world’s problems. During the 1960s, those of us who had the misfortune to attend the better colleges were taught that our mission was to make the world perfect, through the Great Society, arms control, internationalism, disarmament, and so forth. When the Vietnam War and the urban riots of the 1960s showed that the liberalism of our elders had not fixed the world’s problems, we abominated them, and pursued even more radical versions of social engineering. The radicalization of the universities produced a generation of clever people unsuited to productive activity in the real world but skilled at bloviating, and they became the tenured faculty of today. And their salaries, privileges, and perks continued to grow to the point that $50,000 in annual tuition barely covers them. Overall CPI is up 70% since 1990, but tuition and fees have risen by 300%. …

… Rather than produce smart people, the university system has dumbed America down. After two generations of academic wheel-spinning, the transformation of universities into Maoist re-education camps with beer kegs has ruined their practical value. The giant sucking sound you hear is the air going out of the higher education bubble. As the New York Times reported in a Nov. 23 feature, “One of the greatest changes is that a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence. Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from non-elite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability.”

Student loans, with a default rate of 8.8%, are the new subprime debt.

The only good news here is that liberal mainstream culture can’t afford to brainwash as many American kids as it used to. Prof. Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University likes to say that the big question in American politics is whether the red states can produce kids faster than professors from the blue states can corrupt them. …

… long before demographics catch up with liberal culture and extinguish it, like the post-Alexandrine Greeks or the 5th-century Romans, the economic destruction wrought by liberal education will have impoverished most of a generation of American young people.

Instapundit notes a change at the NY Times;

DOINGS AMONG THE ONE PERCENT:

The New York Times Company today abruptly announced that its 61-year-old chief executive officer, Janet Robinson, will leave at the end of the year, with no permanent successor lined up.

An SEC filing says Ms. Robinson will get $4.5 million plus health insurance for a 12-month retirement and consulting agreement, including “two-year non-competition, non-solicitation and non-disparagement covenants, a three-year cooperation covenant and an indefinite confidentiality covenant.”

The Times itself reported that Ms. Robinson’s pay in 2009 was $4.9 million, so she’ll earn almost as much as a retired consultant as as a full-time CEO.

The handy investment calculator on the Times corporate Web site shows that $10,000 invested in NYT stock the day Ms. Robinson took over as CEO, on December 27, 2004, would be worth $1,855.14 today, a decline of 81.45%. The price of the stock went from $40.59 when she took over to $7.53 today, and though some dividends were paid out early in her tenure as CEO, the dividend has since been suspended.

Consequences for failure are for the little people.

Mad Magazine has a cover that catches the spirit of the Obama administration.

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We have more on the Kansas speech. This time from Richard Epstein.

… No amount of data can slow down this president. His deep protectionist instincts are revealed when he stokes the jingoist fires by saying: “If you’re somebody whose job can be done cheaper by a computer or someone in another country, you don’t have a lot of leverage with your employer when it comes to asking for better wages or better benefits, especially since fewer Americans today are part of a union.” At no point does he bother to note the tension between protectionism and his general proposition that Americans are entitled to have better quality goods at better, i.e. lower, prices. Instead, he thinks he can square the circle by forcing wages up while keeping prices down. He takes a regressive stand against automation, outsourcing, and the rationalization of business facilities when he writes:

Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper. Steel mills that needed 100—or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle. And these changes didn’t just affect blue-collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the Internet.

To anyone schooled in economics, these statements reveal a breathtaking ignorance about the sources of national prosperity.  It is a good thing when plants can achieve the same output with less labor. Do we really want an America in which thousands of people work in dangerous occupations to turn molten lava into steel bars? Far better it is that fewer workers are doing those jobs. The jobs lost in that industry will be in part replaced by newer jobs created in the firms that build the equipment that make it possible to run steel mills at a lower cost and far lower risk of personal injury. The former workers can seek jobs in newer industries that will only expand by competing for labor.

And what about those ATM machines? Does the president really want people to have to queue up in banks to make deposits or withdraw cash in order to make a boom market for human tellers? Perhaps we should return to the days before automation, when phone calls were all connected by human operators. And why blast the Internet, which has created far more useful jobs than it has ever destroyed?

The painful ignorance that is revealed in these remarks augurs ill for the long-term recovery of America. With the president firmly determined to set himself against the tides of progress, innovation will be harder to come by. The levels of unemployment will continue to be high as the president works overtime to impose additional restrictions on the labor markets and more taxes at the top of the income distribution—both backhanded ways to reward innovation and growth.

The problem, therefore, with the president’s speech is not that it is demagogic in tone. The problem is that it is intellectually incoherent. As a matter of high principle, the president announces his fealty to markets. As a matter of practical politics, he denigrates and undermines them at every step. It is a frightening prospect to have a president who lives in a time warp that lets him believe that the failed policies of 1935 can lead this nation back from the brink. His chosen constituency, the middle class, should tremble at the prospect that his agenda might well set the course for the United States for the next four years.

As is his want, Newt really stepped in it a few days ago when he trashed Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital. David Harsanyi has it.

This week, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney called on newly minted front-runner and noted historian Newt Gingrich to return the estimated $1.6 million he made providing “strategic advice” to Freddie Mac, the quasi-governmental agency that has done the hard work of making “toxic home mortgages” a forever feature of our national portfolio.

To this, Newt, the great American theorist, unsheathed his trademark intellect and offered a completely irrelevant yet vaguely smart-sounding retort: “If Gov. Romney would give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over the years at Bain, then I would be glad to listen to him. But I bet you $10, not $10,000, that he won’t take the offer.”

Nice, Newt. When the former House speaker wins the nomination, he and the president can discuss how the rich are “bankrupting companies,” engaging in profit-mongering and risky behavior, and generally messing up the world for kicks. And throwing in Romney’s recent debate gaffe (or what I’m told is a gaffe) was a nice touch, as well. You may not have heard: Romney laid down a bet with fellow candidate Rick Perry for a cool $10,000 (or what Newt probably spends on lunch every week) during a recent debate. Doesn’t Mitt know that candidates, no matter how successful they may be, must always act as if they mow their lawns and eat curly fries at diners on Friday nights. If not, the electorate will be deeply insulted.

This kind of rhetoric is nothing new for Republicans. During the 2008 primaries, Mike Huckabee noted that “Mitt Romney looks like the guy that fires you.” This assessment was backed up by then-candidate John McCain, who, we soon found out, understood as much about the economy as Meghan McCain. …

Nice piece by Reason’s Matt Welch illustrates a DC BS generator.

The Aspen Institute, an international public policy nonprofit founded in 1950, describes itself as a “convener.” Rather than push for a specific ideological agenda, the organization brings together elite politicians and journalists in a “neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues.” What happens in Aspen (and Washington, D.C., and other cities where the institute facilitates debates) does not stay in Aspen; the whole point is to influence policy wherever it is discussed and manufactured.

So it was with keen interest that I received an invitation to attend an October 27 Aspen Institute confab in D.C. on “The Role of Government in the Economy.” Libertarians, after all, tend to hold the view that the greater the role of government, the worse the economy. Of even keener interest was the lineup: on the left, recently departed chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden Jared Bernstein; on the right, former Bush administration Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation executive director Bradley Belt, and moderating between them the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington bureau chief and former economics columnist David Leonhardt. Surely there would be some wide-ranging disagreement on the federal government’s role in precipitating and exacerbating the economic malaise of the past four years.

No such luck. In his introductory remarks, moderator Leonhardt laid out as a factual starting point the government’s “extraordinary and largely successful moves to spare us from another Great Depression.” Bernstein went on to decry the “irrational fear of budget deficits at a time when the budget deficit really should be very large.” And Belt repeatedly declined to enumerate a specific appropriate size and scope of government. So much for the debate.

Even more interesting than the soft consensus in favor of government intervention was a strong undercurrent that those who disagreed with it were guilty of denying basic truths. …

Speaking of BS, Charles Gasparino shows how crony capitalism might have greased the skids for Corzine’s MF Global fraud.

… Corzine is to appear before the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations tomorrow, and informed sources tell me the panel is keenly interested in how Corzine (who’d been out of the brokerage business for over a decade) managed to take this firm from nothing to something almost overnight — that is, before its spectacular demise last month.

Keep in mind that being a primary dealer — with the rare privilege to underwrite US government debt sold at auction and then resell those bonds to investors — is no small-fry position. The coveted assignment is usually reserved for the biggest firms that are also considered the market’s safest bets.

The New York Fed selects the best and most financially solid firms for this task for obvious reasons: When markets become volatile, it wants to make sure the firm buying government bonds can withstand the volatility. In other words, the government wants to make sure its primary dealers can take a punch and won’t implode at the slightest turn of the markets.

Yet MF Global was anything but one of the market’s soundest outfits. Not only did a simple disclosure of its of its European debt exposure cause a severe cash-crunch, but the very fact that it lost more than $1 billion in customer funds during its final hours shows that (at minimum) MF Global lacked basic and routine controls.

So how did all of this manage to evade regulators, despite all the new rules promulgated in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis?

Well, William Dudley, who runs the New York Fed (which, again, selected MF Global as a primary dealer), is just one of Corzine’s old Goldman cronies to be found in the MF Global mess. …

Washington Examiner has an example of DC BS. The Navy is paying $15 for a gallon of fuel and patting itself on the back.

With President Obama delaying the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would facilitate access to the estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of oil in North America, the United States Navy is reportedly slated to spend $12 million at a rate of $15 per gallon on a biofuel-gasoline blend — a purchase justified by the proposition that dependence on oil is a national security threat.

“We are doing this for one simple reason: It makes us better fighters,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said, according to a National Journal report last week. “Our use of fossil fuels is a very real threat to our national security and to the U.S. Navy ability to protect America and project power overseas.” …

Hot Air explains the expensive fuel. Turns out, there is an intersection of BS and Obama’s transition team. Can you say crony capitalism?

This is going to help the Defense Department weather looming budget cuts, for sure.  Teaming up with the Department of Agriculture (which has a cheery Rotary Club ring to it), the Navy has purchased 450,000 gallons of biofuel for about $16 a gallon, or about 4 times the price of its standard marine fuel, JP-5, which has been going for under $4 a gallon.

You won’t be surprised to learn that a member of Obama’s presidential transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a “strategic advisor” at Solazyme, the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy.  Glauthier worked – shock, shock – on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill.

The Navy sale isn’t Solazyme’s first trip to the public trough, of course.  The company got a $21.8 million grant from the 2009 stimulus package. …

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David Mamet wants to know why the liberal left has abandoned Israel.

Since its foundation Israel has turned the other cheek. Eric Hoffer wrote that Israel is the only country the world expects to act like Christians. Some Jews say that the Arabs have a better public relations apparatus. They do not need one. For the Liberal West does not need convincing. It is thrilled merely to accept an excuse to rescind what it regards as a colossal error.

The Liberal West has, for decades, indulged itself in an orgy of self-flagellation. We have enjoyed comfort and security, but these, in the absence of gratitude and patriotism, cause insecurity. This attempted cure for insecurity can be seen in protestations of our worthlessness, and the indictment of private property.

But no one in the affluent West and no one among the various protesters of various supposed injustices is prepared to act in accordance with his protestations. The opponent of “The Corporation” is still going to use the iPhone which permits him to mass with his like. The celebrities acting out at Occupy meetings will still invest their surplus capital, and the supposed champion of the dispossessed in the Levant will not only scoff at American Indian claims to land he has come to understand as his—he will lobby the City Council to have the homeless shelter built anywhere but on his block. …

Peter Schiff gets his turn at the Kansas speech.

For most of his time as a national political figure, Barack Obama has been careful to cloak his core socialist leanings behind a veil of pro-capitalist rhetoric. This makes strategic sense, as Americans still largely identify as pro-capitalist. However, based on his recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the President appears to have reassessed the political landscape in advance of the 2012 elections. Based on the growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the recent defeat of Republicans in special elections, he has perhaps sensed a surge of left-leaning sentiment; and, as a result, he finally dropped the pretense.

According to our President’s new view of history, capitalism is a theory that has “never worked.” He argues that its appeal can’t be justified by results, but its popularity is based on Americans’ preference for an economic ideology that “fits well on a bumper sticker.” He feels that capitalism speaks to the flaws in the American DNA, those deeply rooted creation myths that elevate the achievements of individuals and cast unwarranted skepticism on the benefits of government. He argues that this pre-disposition has been exploited by the rich to popularize policies that benefit themselves at the expense of the poor and middle class.

But Obama’s knowledge of history is limited to what is written on his teleprompter. And his selection of the same location that Teddy Roosevelt used to chart an abrupt departure into populist politics is deeply symbolic in the opposite way to that which he intended. It is not by some genetic fluke that Americans distrust government. It is an integral and essential part of our heritage. The United States was founded by people who distrusted government intensely and was subsequently settled, over successive generations, by people fleeing the ravages of government oppression. These Americans relied on capitalism to quickly build the greatest economic power the world had ever seen – from nothing. …

Joel Kotkin says you can blame Obama’s left leanings for his economic failures, but we should also look at his Chicago background.

… If the Chicago system had proven an economic success, perhaps we could excuse Obama for bringing it to the rest of us. Most of us would put up with a bit of corruption and special dealing if the results were strong economic and employment growth.

But the bare demographic and economic facts for both Chicago and Illinois reveal a stunning legacy of failure. Over the past decade, Illinois suffered the third highest loss of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math-related) jobs in the nation, barely beating out Delaware and Michigan. The rest of the job picture is also dismal: Over the past ten years, Illinois suffered the third largest loss of jobs of any state, losing over six percent of its employment.

The state’s demographic picture also is dismal. In the last decade, Illinois lost population not only to sunbelt states such as Texas and Florida but actually managed to have negative migration even with places like California and New York, net losers to virtually everywhere else. In fact, Illinois had a positive net migration with only one major state, Michigan.

Chicago and its Daley dictatorship has been much celebrated in the media – particularly after Obama’s election in everything from the liberal New Yorker to Fast Company, which named Chicago “city of the year”  in 2008. The following year, the Windy City was deemed the best city for men by Askmen.com, for offering what it claimed was “the perfect balance between cosmopolitan and comfortable, combining all of the culture, entertainment and sophistication of an internationally renowned destination with an affordable lifestyle and down-to-earth work hard/play hard character.”

Well, you can make that case,  unless you happen to be searching for a job.  Over the past decade, “the Chicago way” has proven more adept at getting good coverage than creating employment for its residents. In Forbes’ last cities rankings greater Chicago ranked 41st out of the 51 largest metropolitan areas. Between 2001 and 2011 it actually lost jobs. Since 2007  the region has lost more jobs than Detroit, and more than twice as many as New York. It has lost about as many jobs – 250,000 – as up and comer Houston has gained.  In Forbes recent survey of high-tech performance, the Chicago region stood at a dismal 47th among the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas. …

Turning to more pleasant pastimes, it is long past time for Pickings to note Tim Tebow’s unorthodox success. First up is Jeff Neuman.

I have accepted Tim Tebow as my personal quarterback and savior.

If faith is belief in things unseen, with or without evidence, then I have faith in Tim Tebow’s ability as a passer, a leader and a winner.

I have faith that he can, as Jimmy Johnson said on the Fox postgame show, “raise his teammates better than anyone I have ever seen.”

With their 13-10 victory over the Chicago Bears on Sunday, the Broncos are 7-1 since Tebow became their starting quarterback. I know of no explanation for this that excludes the supernatural.

He apparently has the power to cloud men’s minds.

How else can you explain Lovie Smith’s (Chicago Bears Coach) fourth-quarter play-calling? For three quarters, the Bears ran the ball 25 times and threw 18 (including sacks). In the fourth, Smith let Caleb Hanie drop back once in 12 offensive plays, content to rack up the three-and-outs while sitting on a 10-0 lead. His refusal to mix it up even after recovering a Tebow fumble proved costly. …

Woody Paige has more from the Denver Post.

Unbelievabow and Timplausible.

He did it one more time.

They did for the seventh time in eight games and the third time in overtime this season.

“It’s not Tebow Time. It’s Broncos time,” Tim Tebow, the Broncos’ wunderkind quarterback, said Sunday evening.

“Let every man be the master of his time,” William Shakespeare said in another time.

This time the Broncos began their comeback with 4:34 remaining in the fourth quarter and finished their flourish 6:26 into the extra period.

Duh, Bears.

When he was a kid dreaming of playing quarterback in the NFL, “I never read anything or saw anything quite like this,” Tebow told me in the hallway outside the locker room. “It’s pretty special.

. . . I think God has a plan for me.”

Good Lord!

Broncos coach John Fox entered the interview room after his team’s latest miraculous victory and said, “First, want to thank the good Lord.”

He also thanked the players. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Fallon: Turns out that website that rents toys is really preparing kids for life. You get Barbie’s Dream House. and then a month later they foreclose.

Leno: Newt Gingrich meets with Donald Trump. Great combo—two guys, six wives, zero chance of either ever becoming president.

Leno: Charlie Sheen’s ex-wife was arrested for cocaine possession in Colorado after a bar fight. Wow, who’d have thought Charlie was the quiet stable one?