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Toby Harnden leads off our picks on Obama’s war on religion.

At the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington yesterday, President Barack Obama suggested that his desire to raise taxes on higher-income Americans was rooted in the Bible. ‘For me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto to whom much is given, much shall be required’,’ he said.

Which prompted Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah (and a Mormon) to comment acidly: ‘Someone needs to remind the President that there was only one person who walked on water and he did not occupy the Oval Office. I think most Americans would agree that the Gospels are concerned with weightier matters than effective tax rates.’

It was just the latest example of Obama’s tin ear on matters religious. Remember, this is the man who was a member of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago, where sermons about ‘God Damn America’ and the US being responsible for 9/11 were preached but which remained, in Obama’s eyes, a place that was not ‘actually particularly controversial’.

Far more serious, however, than Obama’s crude attempt to state that the rich should pay higher taxes because Jesus wanted them to (in addition to this being, in VP Joe Biden’s view, a patriotic obligation) are his recent actions which amount to a declaration of war on the Roman Catholic church.

On January 20th, as much of the American political class was preoccupied with the impending GOP South Carolina primary, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was a requirement for contraceptive services to be offered by insurance policies supported under the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

While there were exceptions for places of worship, there was no conscience protections for church-run schools, hospitals and social service agencies. These organisations will be required by law to provide free contraception to employees, even thought that is in violation of church teachings.

The move has been condemned by figures on both the Left and Right. The liberal Washington Post columnist E.J.Dionne lit into Obama. So too did his colleague Michael Gerson, formerly President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter. …

Peggy Noonan says the president may have just lost the election.

… But the big political news of the week isn’t Mr. Romney’s gaffe, or even his victory in Florida. The big story took place in Washington. That’s where a bomb went off that not many in the political class heard, or understood.

But President Obama just may have lost the election.

The president signed off on a Health and Human Services ruling that says that under ObamaCare, Catholic institutions—including charities, hospitals and schools—will be required by law, for the first time ever, to provide and pay for insurance coverage that includes contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization procedures. If they do not, they will face ruinous fines in the millions of dollars. Or they can always go out of business.

In other words, the Catholic Church was told this week that its institutions can’t be Catholic anymore.

I invite you to imagine the moment we are living in without the church’s charities, hospitals and schools. And if you know anything about those organizations, you know it is a fantasy that they can afford millions in fines.

There was no reason to make this ruling—none. Except ideology.

The conscience clause, which keeps the church itself from having to bow to such decisions, has always been assumed to cover the church’s institutions.

Now the church is fighting back. …

One of the congresspersons who voted for ObamaCare recants. Weekly Standard Blog has the story.

Former Democratic congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, a Catholic from Erie, Pennsylvania, cast a crucial vote in favor of Obamacare in 2010. She lost her seat that November in part because of her controversial support of Obamacare. But Dahlkemper said recently that she would have never voted for the health care bill had she known that the Department of Health and Human Services would require all private insurers, including Catholic charities and hospitals, to provide free coverage of contraception, sterilization procedures, and the “week-after” pill “ella” that can induce early abortions.

“I would have never voted for the final version of the bill if I expected the Obama Administration to force Catholic hospitals and Catholic Colleges and Universities to pay for contraception,” Dahlkemper said in a press release …

Daniel Henninger says the church is complicit because of the acceptance of federal funds. Fans of Hillsdale College, please note.

… So here we are, with the government demanding that the church hold up its end of a Faustian bargain that was supposed to permit it to perform limitless acts of virtue. Instead, what the government believes the deal is about, more than anything else, is compliance.

Politically bloodless liberals would respond that, net-net, government forcings do much social good despite breaking a few eggs, such as the Catholic Church’s First Amendment sensibilities. That is one view. But the depth of anger among Catholics over this suggests they recognize more is at stake here than political results. They are right. The question raised by the Catholic Church’s battle with ObamaCare is whether anyone can remain free of a U.S. government determined to do what it wants to do, at whatever cost.

Older Americans have sought for years to drop out of Medicare and contract for their own health insurance. They cannot without forfeiting their Social Security payments. They effectively are locked in. Nor can the poor escape Medicaid, even as the care it gives them degrades. Farmers, ranchers and loggers struggled for years to protect their livelihoods beneath uncompromising interpretations of federal environmental laws. They, too, had to comply. University athletic programs were ground up by the U.S. Education Department’s rote, forced gender balancing of every sport offered.

With the transformers, it never stops. In September, the Obama Labor Department proposed rules to govern what work children can do on farms. After an outcry from rural communities over the realities of farm traditions, the department is now reconsidering a “parental exemption.” Good luck to the farmers. …

Michael Barone thinks the president’s isolation leads to bad decisions.

… As in Chicago, Obama seems to live in a cocoon in which Republicans are largely absent, offscreen actors that no one pays any attention to.

His personal interactions are limited to his liberal Democratic staff — and to the rich liberals he meets at his frequent fundraising events. He has held more of these than George W. Bush, who in turn held more than Bill Clinton.

Two decisions in particular seem tilted toward rich liberals. One was the disapproval of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, even after it survived two environmental impact statements.

Obama says he wants more jobs and to reduce American dependence on oil from unfriendly foreign sources. The pipeline would do both, and is endorsed by labor unions. But Robert Redford doesn’t like Canadian tar sands oil. Case closed.

The other astonishing decision was the decree requiring Catholic hospitals and charities’ health insurance policies to include coverage for abortion and birth control. Here Obama was spitting in the eyes of millions of Americans and threatening the existence of charitable programs that help millions of people of all faiths.

Catholic bishops responded predictably by requiring priests to read letters opposing the policy. Who’s on the other side? The designer-clad ladies Obama encounters at every fundraiser. They want to impose their views on abortion on everyone else.

Obama fundraising seems to be lagging behind its $1 billion goal, and Democrats fear Republicans are closing the fundraising gap. So Obama seems to be concentrating on meeting the demands of rich liberals he spends so much time with.

David Brooks, comments on what he called an “underreported story.”

… Brooks made the traditional conservative argument against the administration, suggesting it was a form of “bureaucratic greed”.

“When you have the government saying one size fits all … you are going to do it our way, or not, well, then that insults a lot of people,” he continued. “And so I think this is having resonance across the country. It was — statements were issued in a lot of masses, a lot of pulpits this past Sunday. And, you know, I think it’s going to have a significant lingering effect for a long time.”

This controversary comes concurrent with Obama’s speech at the national prayer breakfast where a critic delivered a devasting prequel. Corner post fills us in.

If the organizers of the national prayer breakfast ever want a sitting president to attend their event again, they need to expect that any leader in his right mind is going to ask — no, demand — that he be allowed to see a copy of the keynote address that is traditionally given immediately before the president’s.

That’s how devastating was the speech given by a little known historical biographer named Eric Metaxas, whose clever wit and punchy humor barely disguised a series of heat-seeking missiles that were sent, intentionally or not, in the commander-in-chief’s direction.

Although Obama began his address directly after Metaxas by saying, “I’m not going to be as funny as Eric but I’m grateful that he shared his message with us,” both his tone and speech itself were flat, and he looked as though he wished he could either crawl into a hole or have a different speech in front of him.

In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking that somehow Metaxas had been given an advance copy of Obama’s talk, then tailored his own to rebut the president’s.

Metaxas, a Yale grad and humor writer who once wrote for the children’s series Veggie Tales, began his speech with several jokes and stole the show early on when he noted that George W. Bush, often accused by his critics of being incurious, had read Metaxas’s weighty tome on the German theologian Bonhoeffer; he then proceeded to hand a copy to the president while intoning: “No pressure.”

Obama has been under pressure for some time now to somehow prove his Christian bonafides, for it’s no secret that millions of Americans doubt his Christian faith. A Pew Poll taken in 2010 found that only one third of Americans identified him as a Christian, and even among African-Americans, 46 percent said they were unsure of what religion he practiced.

Obama came to the prayer breakfast with a tidy speech that was clearly designed to lay those doubts to rest. He spoke of his daily habit of prayer and Bible reading, his regular conversations with preachers like T. D. Jakes and Joel Hunter, and even told a story of the time he prayed over Billy Graham.

But before the president could utter a word, it was Metaxas who delivered a devastating, albeit apparently unintentional critique of such God-talk, recounting his own religious upbringing which he described as culturally Christian yet simultaneously full of “phony religiosity.”

“I thought I was a Christian. I guess I was lost,” he matter-of-factly stated.

Standing no more than five feet from Obama whose binder had a speech chock full of quotes from the Good Book, Metaxas said of Jesus:

“When he was tempted in the desert, who was the one throwing Bible verses at him? Satan. That is a perfect picture of dead religion. Using the words of God to do the opposite of what God does. It’s grotesque when you think about it. It’s demonic.”

“Keep in mind that when someone says ‘I am a Christian’ it may mean absolutely nothing,” Metaxas added for good measure, in case anybody missed his point. 

The eerie feeling that Metaxas was answering Obama on a speech he had yet to give continued …

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Time for a good look at Charles Murray’s latest effort. First a review in the Wall Street Journal.

So much for the idea that the white working class remains the guardian of core American values like religious faith, hard work and marriage. Today the denizens of upscale communities like McLean, Va., New Canaan, Conn., and Palo Alto, Calif., according to Charles Murray in “Coming Apart,” are now much more likely than their fellow citizens to embrace these core American values. In studying, as his subtitle has it, “the state of white America, 1960-2010,” Mr. Murray turns on its head the conservative belief that bicoastal elites are dissolute and ordinary Americans are virtuous.

Focusing on whites to avoid conflating race with class, Mr. Murray contends instead that a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.

He is particularly concerned with the ways in which working-class whites are losing touch with what he calls the four “founding virtues”—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion, all of which have played a vital role in the life of the republic.

Consider what has happened with marriage. …

Here’s a review from Real Clear Books.

Americans, the saying goes, don’t like to talk about class — but they certainly enjoy reading about it. They also love to see how they stack up against their peers.

One of the most notorious and snobby books on the topic, Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, capitalizes on this repressed American passion with its “Living Room Scale,” which measures social class based on your décor. A worn Oriental rug will earn you eight points; a new one (and, by extension, new money) will lower your score. A ceiling 10 feet or higher is good; the presence of Reader’s Digest, framed diplomas, or “any work of art depicting cowboys” (sorry, pardners) is not.

Charles Murray, the prominent political scientist, doesn’t shy away from awkward subjects — he’s best known for The Bell Curve, which stirred up a progressive hornet’s nest in the mid-1990s — and he tackles the charged issue of class in his new and important book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. America, Murray writes, “is coming apart at the seams — not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.” Culture, not money, divides the new upper and lower classes, which live in increasingly different worlds: one rarefied, walled-off, and at the helm of the country; the other dysfunctional, adrift, and hapless when it comes to the game of life.

Tracking white Americans to avoid blurring trends with race and ethnicity, the numbers Murray presents are startling: In the new upper class, which amounts to about 20 percent of the country, out-of-wedlock births are rare: around 6-8 percent. For the more dysfunctional working class, which accounts for around 30 percent of the country, the number is mind-boggling: 42-48 percent. The numbers also turn a few stereotypes on their heads: In the lower working class, for instance, the rate of church attendance has dropped at nearly double the rate as that of the supposedly secularized elite.

America’s working class, Coming Apart argues, has increasingly forsaken traditional values like marriage, religion, industriousness, and honesty — and, as a result, it is rotting from within. Happiness levels are down; participation in the labor force is down; television watching (an average of 35 hours a week) is up. …

WSJ Live Chat featured Mr. Murray.

Question from reader Alan: I read and reviewed your book on Amazon. Most reviewers believe your book is important because it accurately portrays the shrinking middle class. However, many disagree with your perception of the CAUSE. You seem to believe that the middle class is shrinking because of a decline in MORALITY — of middle class people being less willing to marry, go to church, and find work today than before. Most of the reviewers believe the middle class is shrinking because of ECONOMICS, because it is less easy to obtain work that pays an income that allows one to support a family. In other words, many believe that lack of MONEY, not lack of MORALITY, is what is shrinking the middle class.

Charles Murray: Actually, I don’t say the middle class is shrinking. But the economics question is the big one. Short story: working class wages didn’t rise over the last 50 years, but neither did they fall. And the bad things regarding labor force participation increased during the boom. When you talk to people in working class communities about men, the women aren’t telling you that their guys are looking desperately for work but can’t find it. An amazing number of them aren’t interested in working.

Question from reader Florida Bob: Stimulus only works if it encourages Americans to purchase-American made goods. We seem to be creating more jobs in China than America. Most of the jobs being created here are service jobs, jobs that create nothing that is trade-able for the imported manufactured goods and energy that they consume.

Charles Murray: This book isn’t about life in the Great Recession. It’s about what happened to work in the boom years of the 1980s, 1990s, and part of the 2000s when jobs were plentiful, including low-skill jobs paying good wages.

Reader Doug81: Can Mr. Murray comment on how there is a cultural divide between “classes” on how we treat money? In my opinion, the people of “Belmont” take advantage of excellent mortgage offers and credit card rebates while the people of “Fishtown” pay high interest on bad loans or loan-like transactions.

Clarification from Ryan Sager: Fishtown – for those who haven’t read the excerpt – is a real neighborhood in Philadelphia that Mr. Murray uses as a stand-in for the white working class.

Charles Murray: We’re talking about IQ more than culture. It helps to be living in a neighborhood where smart actions about money are common, but the main breakdown is IQ. Lots of smart people in Fishtown do the right thing, but (politically incorrect warning) there are more smart people in Belmont than in Fishtown.

Reader Oscar Looez-Guerra: Are we encouraging a divided society by delaying the assimilation of immigrants?

Charles Murray: Absolutely. But I have to say that all the immigrants I run across, and there are lots in my region, seem to act more like real Americans than a lot of the people already here.

Reader Randall Ward: What do you believe has been the root cause of the degeneration of the people on the bottom?

Charles Murray: The 60s have a heavy load of blame to bear, both in the political reforms of that era and the films/television cultural shifts. But that doesn’t tell us much about where we go from here. …

Just before we get to the humor section, we have a story from the Sun-Times where the joke of a Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, gets dishonorable mention. You see, over the past five years Chicago Public Schools has passed out a quarter of a billion dollars of unused vacation and sick pay to retirees. Duncan got $50,000.

The cash-strapped Chicago Public Schools system spends tens of millions of dollars annually on a perk that few other employers offer: cash to departing employees for unused time off.

Since 2006, the district paid a total $265 million to employees for unused sick and vacation days, according to an analysis of payroll and benefit data obtained by the Better Government Association under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

By far the largest share — $227 million — went to longtime employees for sick days accumulated over two or three decades.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently ordered a halt on paying unused sick time to non-union employees at City Colleges of Chicago after the BGA found at least $3 million in such payouts to former employees over the last decade. Among the biggest beneficiaries was former Chancellor Wayne Watson, who has received $300,000 of a promised $500,000 payout for 500 unused sick days.

“This policy is unacceptable to the mayor and not consistent with the city’s sick day policies for its own employees,” said Jennifer Hoyle, a spokeswoman for Emanuel. The mayor also directed other city agencies, including CPS, to halt such payments, review their policies and devise plans to end the practice permanently.

At CPS, the top payouts went to top brass, including more than 300 longtime principals and administrators, who received more than $100,000 during the six-year period from 2006 to 2011, the BGA found. The highest payment topped $250,000.

Beneficiaries included former schools CEO Arne Duncan, now U.S. Secretary of Education, who received $50,297 for unused vacation time when he left in January 2009, according to the data. Duncan now believes the policy should be re-evaluated. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: Starbucks closes its very first East Coast store after 19 years. It just couldn’t keep up with its main competition, a Starbucks across the street.

Conan: Now word that the government may be required to release the Osama bin Laden killing video. Obama says this is, “Unhelpful, inflammatory and please release it two days before the election?”

Leno: President Obama is working on a new tourism plan to make it easier for foreigners to get into the U.S. We have that already. It’s called Mexico.

Letterman: Newt Gingrich wants to build a colony on the Moon. OK, you say, but why? Well, he wants to be the first American to get divorced on the Moon.

Letterman: Wow, Super Bowl. Let’s break it down: $184 million for potato chips, $250 million for pretzels, $500 million for beer, $4 for celery.

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Bill Kristol says it is not just about the economy.

… focusing a campaign only on the economy is risky. The economy is unpredictable, and may end up doing well enough in 2012 that it doesn’t automatically help the Republicans—even if the nominee is someone who can boast of his success in the private sector and knowledge of how business works. …

… Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen how Obama-care threatens freedom of religion (see Jonathan V. Last’s piece in this issue). We’ve been reminded of Eric Holder’s pathetic and ideological mismanagement of the Department of Justice (see Mark Hemingway’s editorial). We’ve seen several instances of this president’s weakness in foreign policy (see Elliott Abrams’s editorial). We’ve had reminders from the Congressional Budget Office of the looming entitlement and budget disaster and of the Obama administration’s gross irresponsibility on that front.

So there’s plenty besides the economy for the GOP to call attention to, to shout about, to use to illustrate the short and long-term dangers of Obama administration policies. A successful Republican presidential candidate will have to be about far more than the economy, narrowly understood, in order to win the election and to lay the groundwork for successful governance. Ronald Reagan famously asked at the end of the 1980 campaign whether we were better off than we had been four years before. But he had spent his whole campaign laying the predicate for that question by explaining why the Carter administration’s foreign and domestic policies had failed, not just economically but socially, and not just at home but in the world. He was also able to explain why liberal policies would continue us on a downward path. Reagan never left any doubt that the fundamental problem wasn’t just a few quarters of subpar economic performance. The problem was the arrogant destructiveness and wrongheaded fecklessness of modern liberalism. It still is.

Mark Steyn says Komen didn’t have it coming.

As Sen. Obama said during the 2008 campaign, words matter. Modern “liberalism” is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of “tolerance” are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to “celebrate diversity” coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity. Thus, the Obama administration’s insistence that Catholic institutions must be compelled to provide free contraception, sterilization and abortifacients. This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity.

The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: In Sweden, expressing a moral objection to homosexuality is illegal, even on religious grounds, even in church, and a pastor minded to cite the more robust verses of Leviticus would risk four years in jail. In Canada, the courts rule that Catholic schools must allow gay students to take their same-sex dates to the prom. The secular state’s Bureau of Compliance is merciless to apostates to a degree even your fire-breathing imams might marvel at.

Consider the current travails of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. This is the group responsible for introducing the pink “awareness-raising” ribbon for breast cancer – as emblematic a symbol of America’s descent into postmodernism as anything. It has spawned a thousand other colored “awareness-raising” ribbons: my current favorite is the periwinkle ribbon for acid reflux. We have had phenomenal breakthroughs in hues of awareness-raising ribbons, and for this the Susan G. Komen Foundation deserves due credit.

Until the other day, Komen were also generous patrons of Planned Parenthood, the “women’s health” organization. The Foundation then decided it preferred to focus on organizations that are “providing the lifesaving mammogram.” Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms, despite its president, Cecile Richards, testifying to the contrary before Congress last year. Rather, Planned Parenthood provides abortions; it’s the biggest abortion provider in the United States. For the breast cancer bigwigs to wish to target their grants more relevantly is surely understandable.

But not if you’re a liberal enforcer. Sen. Barbara Boxer, with characteristic understatement, compared the Komen Foundation’s Nancy Brinker to Joe McCarthy: …

Jennifer Rubin has Komen comments too.

… You might agree or not but the presumptuousness of liberal members of Congress who believe it is within their purview to bully private charities suggests that the left really does not understand the important distinction between public policy and private, voluntary civil institutions. (See my colleague Greg Sargent’s piece on the letter that two dozen members sent to the Komen Foundation.) … 

… Pardon me, but this is nuts. Planned Parenthood can raise its own money (which it did in spades in the wake of the flap). Those who want to give to a breast cancer charity can donate with the peace of mind that their money will be used to fight breast cancer. (Donors did so generously as a result of the controversy.) Now Planned Parenthood’s bosses have every right under current law to do what they do and raise money to fund their organization. But shame on them for intimidating other groups that might contemplate the same move as the Susan G. Komen Foundation made.

And to members of Congress, let me say: Butt out. Don’t you have enough to handle not doing your own jobs without hectoring charities to do your bidding?

Ross Douthat wonders why the media is so blind about abortion.

IN the most recent Gallup poll on abortion, as many Americans described themselves as pro-life as called themselves pro-choice. A combined 58 percent of Americans stated that abortion should either be “illegal in all circumstances” or “legal in only a few circumstances.” These results do not vary appreciably by gender: in the first Gallup poll to show a slight pro-life majority, conducted in May 2009, half of American women described themselves as pro-life.

But if you’ve followed the media frenzy surrounding the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation’s decision — which it backpedaled from, with an apology, after a wave of frankly brutal coverage — to discontinue about $700,000 in funding for Planned Parenthood, you would think all these millions of anti-abortion Americans simply do not exist.

From the nightly news shows to print and online media, the coverage’s tone alternated between wonder and outrage — wonder that anyone could possibly find Planned Parenthood even remotely controversial and outrage that the Komen foundation had “politicized” the cause of women’s health.

Steven Malanga writes in the Journal about the court that has broken New Jersey. 

When he decided against running for president last fall, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he had lots more to do to fix his “broken” state. Certainly true on spending and taxes, where Mr. Christie has made significant progress. But there’s another issue he’s only begun to take on: the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Last month Mr. Christie nominated two new members to the court, easily one of the most activist in the nation. His appointments could reshape the seven-member panel, which over the past half-century has transformed the Garden State, seizing control of school funding and hijacking the zoning powers of towns and cities, among other moves.

“I don’t think the supreme court has any business being involved in setting the budget of the state government,” the governor complained last year. Yet it is, extensively.

New Jersey’s supreme court is the product of the state’s 1947 constitution, which jettisoned the unwieldy 16-member Court of Errors and Appeals. The new court established in its place was shaped by Arthur Vanderbilt, a former dean of New York University’s law school who served as the court’s first chief justice. Vanderbilt is best remembered for persuading President Dwight Eisenhower to appoint to the U.S. Supreme Court William Brennan, who then led that court’s liberal activist wing for more than three decades.

The New Jersey court was power-hungry from its inception, but its ambition began bearing serous fruit, especially regarding education policy, in the 1970s. …

Politico has the story of Dick Armey dispensing with Newt.

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), head of FreedomWorks, said Sunday presidential candidate Newt Gingrich won’t have another comeback.

“I don’t think Newt will be able to replicate that magic moment,” Armey said, adding he believes Gingrich’s peak in South Carolina was a momentary surge and he has “played that string out.”

“I feel bad for him. I think he’s digressed; taking a second-rate campaign into a first-rate vendetta,” Armey said of Gingrich’s attacks on GOP front-runner Mitt Romney.

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Josh Kraushaar of National Journal with the first of three reports on the election. He says Obama is struggling in the battleground states.

President Obama’s reelection team has spun multiple pathways to an electoral vote majority, but a glance at his state-by-state approval ratings throughout 2011 suggests the campaign has been doing a lot of bluffing.

First, the good news for Team Obama: His political standing is in respectable shape in traditionally Democratic Midwestern battlegrounds, like Wisconsin, Michigan and the more Republican heartland state of Iowa (46 approval/46 disapproval). Obama’s numbers in Virginia are better than in other battleground states – 45 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove.  And his numbers in North Carolina (44/49 approve/disapprove) and Florida (44/48 approve/disapprove) and even Georgia (45/48 approve/disapprove) aren’t good, but given his overall numbers, they are relatively decent.

The bad news: His job approval ratings in the other battleground states are solidly underwater and, in many states, worse than publicly perceived. …

Kraushaar’s second report is on Romney’s Bain record and the failure of Newt to gain traction with this line of campaigning.

President Obama’s re-election team has been focused on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital as a major part of its offensive against the former Massachusetts governor, hoping to portray him as a heartless capitalist who laid off workers while restructuring companies

Two new polls conducted over the last week — one nationally and one in Florida — raise questions on the potency of that message.  A new ABC News/Washington Post poll, released today, finds that a narrow 40 percent plurality view Romney’s work “buying and restructuring companies” unfavorably, with 35 percent viewing it favorably. Among independents, it’s a near-even split: 35 percent view Romney’s work at Bain favorably, while 36 percent view it unfavorably.

In the battleground state of Florida, a Mason-Dixon poll conducted for the Tampa Times and Miami Herald, showed favorable results for Romney. Nearly half (46 percent) of Florida voters viewed Romney’s business background positively, while just 30 percent negatively. …

The Third is on the disappearance of Obama’s fundraising advantage.

Every presidential election, there’s a new development that changes the nature of campaigns that one party, often the one out of power, takes advantage of.  In 2008, it was the Obama team’s impressive use of social media to connect with new young voters and expand the electorate. In 2004, it was the Bush campaign’s savvy use of micro-targeting technologies to identify narrow slices of the electorate, and get them to show up and vote Republican.

This year, it’s the Republicans’ adept and aggressive use of super PACs to even the financial playing field, blunting the often-massive money advantages that an incumbent president has at his disposal. With the emergence of American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS and Restore Our Future, a well-stocked Romney super PAC, the Obama fundraising juggernaut no longer looks so imposing.  If Romney is the Republican nominee, he won’t be overwhelmed with a wave of negative advertising, and will have the resources to fight back.

Take a look at the end-of-year numbers. …

Also from National Journal, Ron Brownstein looks at the numbers for the president.

… In the 2011 numbers, the situation looks much more difficult for Obama. From 2010 to 2011, Gallup found, his average approval ratings dropped in every state except Connecticut, Maine and (oddly enough) Wyoming. As a result, to reach 270 Electoral College votes based on the 2011 numbers, he would need to win 20 states plus the District of Columbia where his approval rating stands at 44.5 percent or more. Since one of the states above that line is Georgia, which is also a stretch for Obama in practice, to reach 270 he would more likely need to carry Oregon and North Carolina, where his approval ratings stood at 44.5 percent and 43.7 percent, respectively. (It’s worth filing away that the scenario based on either year’s numbers – Virginia and North Carolina  stand right at the tipping point between victory and defeat for Obama.)

In sum then, Obama in 2010 could reach an Electoral College majority by carrying states where his approval rating stood at least at 46.6 percent, something that would be difficult but hardly impossible. To reach a majority based on the 2011 results, he’d need to carry states where his approval stood at 43.7 percent or above. That’s a much more daunting prospect. …

Think the GOP is having a bad time in the selection process, Frank Fleming says look what the Dems are stuck with.

It’s a crucial election year. As another global financial crisis looms and rogue states pursue nuclear weapons, the American people are desperately looking for a strong leader to show them the way to a brighter tomorrow.

So it’s unconscionable that the Democratic primaries have yet to produce a single serious candidate for president.

This election is a great opportunity for the Democrats. After the setbacks the party has suffered, the Tea Party is finally dying down, and people are getting fed up with the Republicans in Congress. If the Democrats could come up with a strong candidate for the White House, he or she would easily win the election.

Yet, for some reason, many of the most promising Democrats chose not to run in the primaries, and those who did run are not appealing candidates. Indeed, the front-runner who has swept the early primary states despite a lack of enthusiastic support, Barack Obama, is just not a viable candidate in the general election. …

Last week Ann Coulter was touting Romneycare. David Harsanyi is not as enthused.

… No doubt, the impending presidential debate will center on the state of the economy — and general election voters are far less ideologically motivated than primary voters. Yet grander themes can move people. Obama will continue to spin tales about a nation strangled by capitalistic excess and inequity. It is an arching theme that plays on the fears of many nervous Americans and is sure to animate grass-roots supporters in urban tent environments everywhere.

Republicans, in turn, have lost a genuine opportunity to point to the purest example of Obama’s aversion to economic and individual freedom. It’s the mandate that allows Obamacare to assault religious freedom. It’s the mandate, coupled with increasing regulatory burdens, that many people fear will limit consumer choice and competition.

The entire project falls apart without the mandate.

No doubt, Mitt or Newt will continue to promise to overturn the health care reform law — and, who knows, the winner may. Or perhaps the Supreme Court will save us all by deeming the mandate unconstitutional. But to think, after all the anger and frustration caused by Obamacare — not to mention its persisting unpopularity — one of the strongest arguments against it has been dulled before the GOP presidential nominee could even make it.

Walter Russell Mead posts on the decline in global warming.

As the world suffers through a mix of weather (warm winter temperatures) in the continental US and climate (cold weather) in Alaska and Europe, some interesting new numbers are starting to trickle in.

Preliminary reports from the Energy Information Administration’s “Annual Energy Outlook” (which will be fully published in April) suggest that any carbon crisis may not be quite as imminent as thought. Not so long ago, the EIA predicted carbon emissions levels would rise by 37 percent between 2005 and 2035. The EIA — get this – now thinks that global CO2 emissions in 2025 will be 6 percent lower than they were in 2005.

Check the report for yourself, but to Via Meadia and others this looks like a serious reduction in the forecast of carbon emissions over the next couple decades. There are likely numerous reasons for the change; easier access to cleaner fuel sources like shale gas, the rising price of oil and cheapening of solar and wind are but several.

And there is one other thing that is clear: the people who put these forecasts together have no idea what they are doing.  This is one of the cases in which the use of the word forecast should be banned; these are guesses, not forecasts, and it’s a big deal. …

The Economist reports on satellite info that has forced China to be more forthcoming about pollution.

“PM2.5” seems an odd and wonky term for the blogosphere to take up, but that is precisely what has happened in China in recent weeks. It refers to the smallest solid particles in the atmosphere—those less than 2.5 microns across. Such dust can get deep into people’s lungs; far deeper than that rated as PM10. Yet until recently China’s authorities have revealed measurements only for PM10. When people realised this, an online revolt broke out. Such was the public pressure that authorities caved in, and PM2.5 data are now being published for Beijing and a handful of other cities.

What of the rest of China? At the moment, only PM10 data are available. But the government’s hand may soon be forced here, too. Though pollution data are best collected near the ground, a plausible estimate may be made from the vantage-point of a satellite by measuring how much light is blocked by particles, and estimating from those particles’ chemical composition the likely distribution of their sizes. And a report prepared for The Economist by a team led by Angel Hsu of Yale University does just that, drawing on data from American satellites to map out PM2.5 pollution across the entire country. …

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Mark Steyn Alert. He will be on C-Span 2   Sunday from noon to 3 o’clock.

Pre-Game Show

If you’ll forgive some end-of-week plugola, as you might have noticed from various promotional graphics around the page, I’ll be on C-Span2?s Book TV this Sunday just ahead of the Superbowl from 12 noon Eastern for a full three hours talking about my oeuvre, and taking viewers’ questions thereupon. Oeuvre-wise, I’m flattered they think mine will stretch to a full three hours, but, if it doesn’t, I’m happy to do wardrobe malfunctions by request.

Charles Krauthammer thinks getting rid of Assad in Syria is important for many reasons.

Imperial regimes can crack when they are driven out of their major foreign outposts. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not only signal the liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow. It prefigured the collapse of the Soviet Union itself just two years later.

The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria could be similarly ominous for Iran. The alliance with Syria is the centerpiece of Iran’s expanding sphere of influence, a mini-Comintern that includes such clients as Iranian-armed and -directed Hezbollah, now the dominant power in Lebanon; and Hamas, which controls Gaza and threatens to take the rest of Palestine (the West Bank) from a feeble Fatah.

Additionally, Iran exerts growing pressure on Afghanistan to the east and growing influence in Iraq to the west. Tehran has even extended its horizon to Latin America, as symbolized by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s solidarity tour through Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Cuba.

Of all these clients, Syria is the most important. It’s the only Arab state openly allied with non-Arab Iran. This is significant because the Arabs see the Persians as having had centuries-old designs to dominate the Middle East. Indeed, Iranian arms and trainers, transshipped to Hezbollah through Syria, have given the Persians their first outpost on the Mediterranean in 2,300 years. …

Ted Olson, attorney for the Koch brothers, tells what it is like to be on Obama’s enemies list.

How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president’s re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?

What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the president’s surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president’s party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly—and accurately—stated that you have no involvement?

Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an attractive political punching bag by the president’s re-election team. This is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president’s or anyone else’s office.

What Messrs. Koch do, in fact, is manage businesses that provide employment to more than 50,000 people in North America in legitimate, productive industries. They also give millions of dollars to medical researchers, hospitals and cultural institutions. Their biggest offense, apparently, is that they also contribute generously to nonprofit organizations that promote personal liberty and free enterprise, and some of those organizations oppose policies advocated by the president.

Richard Nixon maintained an”enemies list” that singled out private citizens for investigation and abuse by agencies of government, including the Internal Revenue Service. …

Charles Murray has written a new book. David Brooks gushed about a few days ago. Of course, the Brooks solution involves government coercion.

… Today, Murray demonstrates, there is an archipelago of affluent enclaves clustered around the coastal cities, Chicago, Dallas and so on. If you’re born into one of them, you will probably go to college with people from one of the enclaves; you’ll marry someone from one of the enclaves; you’ll go off and live in one of the enclaves.

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. …

Pickerhead got off his own rant about Omaha Scrooge in the August 21, 2011 Pickings. Now, the Dark Side of Saint Warren comes from Charles Gasparino.

… in all my years in journalism, I’ve never seen a business figure get such a free pass from the media even when his public pronouncements are oozing with hypocrisy, let alone when he steps over the line into sleaze — as Buffett has done on more than one occasion.

But then “St. Warren” wears his liberal politics on his sleeve: He wholeheartedly backed Obama back in 2008, and now is lending his name (and his secretary’s) to Obama’s cockamamie tax scheme, a k a the Buffett Rule — which would barely make a dent in the federal deficit, but would certainly squeeze small-business owners and other job-creators.

Now, Buffett’s hypocrisy on taxes is well known to readers of these pages: He decries the fact that rich investors like him get taxed mainly at the lower capital-gains rate of 15 percent. Yet he made his vast fortune enjoying that favorable treatment, and largely kept his mouth shut until now, as he nears the end of his long career. Plus, he plans to use a charitable trust to further shield much of his income from taxes.

Much less has been said about Buffett’s unsaintly investment record. I won’t bore you with every gory detail of his questionable associations, which include no-lose investments in Goldman Sachs and General Electric just before the companies received massive federal aid during the financial crisis.

But other items really take the shine off St. Warren’s halo — like his insistence that the ratings agencies didn’t play a key role in setting up the 2008 financial meltdown.

In fact, the ratings biz was rife with conflicts of interest, since the agencies were paid by the same entities they were rating. Most people figure that’s why these “watchdogs” ignored major signs of trouble in the housing markets as they slapped all those Triple-A ratings on the toxic housing-related debt that was at the heart of the financial crisis.

But Buffett has publicly defended the rating agencies as bit players in the debacle, caught up in the mania much like nearly everyone else. His obvious motive: He held a major stake in rating agency Moody’s Investors Service, so Berkshire got a nice cut out of all those fees that Moody’s “earned” as it fueled the crisis.

It’s hard to believe a conservative businessman would be able to get away with that hypocrisy — not to mention the association with a business that helped do so much damage to the US economy. …

Caroline Baum tells government; Just fix the darn potholes, we’ll do the rest.

… I’m all for changing the tax code — to something we can comply with via a postcard-size return. Creating new exemptions or tax breaks to induce companies to do what the government wants them to do isn’t the answer.

The tax code shouldn’t favor manufacturers over service providers; farmers over miners; exporters over importers; borrowers over savers. As part of the oath of office, presidents should be required to commit to the following:

The tax code should be designed to raise the revenue the government needs to perform its legitimate functions (Obama and Ron Paul may disagree on what constitutes “legitimate”), not to produce socially desirable behavior (buy homes, have children).

It should promote economic growth, not punish success.

It should be constant, not an ever-changing vehicle for managing the business cycle.

When it comes to the government’s involvement in the private sector, we need more Darwin (natural selection) and less Lenin (central control). Everyone knows the government can’t pick winners and losers. …

Four charts from Kenneth Green at American.com show the slowdown of Gulf oil permits the administration denies.

Thanks to the people at the New Orleans Regional Economic Alliance, one can cut through all the claims about how oil drilling in the United States is back to normal since the Gulf oil spill.

The figures below show the trends in both shallow- and deep-water drilling permit approvals in the gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As can be seen, the Obama administration did not let that crisis go to waste, it used it to implement another plank in its anti-fossil fuel agenda. …

… Regardless of the Obama administration’s claims that they aren’t hindering oil exploration and development in the Gulf, a few minutes of looking at their own data tells the real story: they’re both cutting it down, and stretching it out.

Imagine; last year you’re playing in a college bowl game, and one year later – the Super Bowl. WSJ has a story on the Giants’ 12 rookies on the field today.

For almost two weeks now, Tyler Sash has tried to stay out of David Diehl’s way. Because every time Diehl, the veteran offensive lineman, catches sight of Sash, the rookie safety, he shakes his head, frowns and mutters something:

“You lucky rookies.”

“Your first year in, and you’re in the Super Bowl?”

“How is this fair?”

So much for no crying in football.

“No, I get why he says all that,” Sash said. “Kind of.”

And there’s the beauty to the Giants’ enormous rookie class: They only kind of get this. Here on Sunday, against the Patriots, they will be a part of Super Bowl XVI, the greatest spectacle of sport in America. They will compete for the Lombardi Trophy and immortality—and not one of the Giants’ 12 first-year players is fully registering what that means. According to Stats LLC, only six Super Bowl teams have had more first-year players, including the 2007 Giants. …

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Spengler says the president’s Egypt policies have placed him in foreign policy hell.

It won’t decide the 2012 election, but the meltdown of Barack Obama’s Islamophile foreign policy has to hurt. Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons humiliates a president so committed to dialogue with the evil lunatics in Tehran that he refused to support a mass outpouring of democracy demonstrators during the summer of 2009. Obama’s closest foreign policy friendship is with the Islamist president of Turkey, who has jailed more journalists than China and steered his country towards imminent economic disaster. Tayyip Erdogan may not be a terrorist, as Rick Perry said in last week’s debate, but he backs them, including Hamas. …

… To adapt Freud, Egypt has gone from ordinary unhappiness to hysterical misery, thanks in large measure to the Obama administration’s decision to pull the rug out from under Mubarak. It would have happened eventually, to be sure, but the point is that it happened on Obama’s watch, as the result of Obama’s actions.

Since he, his ideas, and his allies would make military units weaker and weaker, there is something unseemly about Obama’s use of the SEALs as campaign props. WSJ OpEd tells the story.

America’s premier Special Operations force is once again in the headlines after a team of Navy SEALs rescued two hostages from captivity in Somalia last week. Elite U.S. forces have carried out such operations periodically over the past decade, always with skill and bravery. The difference in recent months is that the details of their work haven’t remained secret. On the contrary, government officials have revealed them for political gain—endangering our forces in the process.

The floodgates opened after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last May, and the Obama administration’s lack of discretion was on display again at last week’s State of the Union address. As President Obama entered the House chamber, in full view of the cameras, he pointed to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and exclaimed: “Good job tonight, good job tonight.” Clearly something had happened that he wanted the world to know about.

After delivering his speech, which included multiple references to the bin Laden raid, the president again thanked Mr. Panetta. “That was a good thing tonight,” he said as if to ensure that the viewing public, if they missed it initially, would get it a second time around.

Sure enough, shortly thereafter, the White House announced the successful rescue of the hostages in Somalia by U.S. Special Operations forces. …

Right wing enforcer Ann Coulter touts RomneyCare.

If only the Democrats had decided to socialize the food industry or housing, Romneycare would probably still be viewed as a massive triumph for conservative free-market principles — as it was at the time.

It’s not as if we had a beautifully functioning free market in health care until Gov. Mitt Romney came along and wrecked it by requiring that Massachusetts residents purchase their own health insurance. In 2007, when Romneycare became law, the federal government alone was already picking up the tab for 45.4 percent of all health care expenditures in the country.

Until Obamacare, mandatory private health insurance was considered the free-market alternative to the Democrats’ piecemeal socialization of the entire medical industry.

In November 2004, for example, libertarian Ronald Bailey praised mandated private health insurance in Reason magazine, saying that it “could preserve and extend the advantages of a free market with a minimal amount of coercion.”

A leading conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, helped design Romneycare, and its health care analyst, Bob Moffit, flew to Boston for the bill signing.

Romneycare was also supported by Regina Herzlinger, Harvard Business School professor and health policy analyst for the conservative Manhattan Institute. Herzlinger praised Romneycare for making consumers, not business or government, the primary purchasers of health care.

The bill passed by 154-2 in the Massachusetts House and unanimously, 37-0, in the Massachusetts Senate — including the vote of Sen. Scott Brown, who won Teddy Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate in January 2010 by pledging to be the “41st vote against Obamacare.” …

Jennifer Rubin dances a bit on Newt’s grave. We enjoyed it too.

Newt Gingrich gave his post-primary speech tonight while gracelessly declining to congratulate the man who beat him by double digits. According to the Romney campaign, Gingrich hadn’t called to congratulate the Florida winner as of 9:30 p.m. ET.

The speech was vintage Gingrich, comparing his predicament to Lincoln at Gettysburg and vowing to conduct a “people’s campaign.” He made one small run at Romney, calling him “the Massachusetts moderate,” and then wandered into a rather trite recitation of his commitment to change. He rambled a bit, getting nostalgic about his Contract with America and assuring us he’d been studying “how to do this” since 1958. (He was running for president as a child?) He is going to get rid of White House czars, move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and halt the war on religion. If there was a theme in there, it was hard to spot.

He obnoxiously ended by pledging: “My life, my fortune, my sacred honor.” But he’s not doing any of that. And it’s quite an insult to American patriots who have said that and meant it. …

Roger Simon posts on why Gingrich lost so big.

For a supposedly smart guy, Newt Gingrich made a bonehead error in Florida that not only cost him that state but almost certainly any serious chance of the Republican nomination. And in so doing, he, almost idiotically, undercut the very thing that had made his candidacy successful in the first place.

After his solid victory in South Carolina, Gingrich did not continue the obvious strategy that got him there – running against Barack Obama by presenting himself to Republican voters as the great orator and thinker who could bring down the noxious incumbent, the man who rose above internecine intra-party squabbles for the greater good of his country.

Instead, he did the exact opposite. He spent the balance of his time in Florida running against Romney when he had already beaten the former governor in South Carolina. Talk about dumb. Newt let his personal antipathy overwhelm his good sense. He played defense about the picayune and the irrelevant when he should have played offense on the philosophical and substantial.

No wonder Gingrich’s poll numbers dropped and dropped. What the Republican electorate cares about is Obama and who can beat him. Newt took his eye off the ball, wasted time and demeaned himself attacking Romney — not the least of which was an extraordinarily vicious (not to mention untrue) accusation that Romney denied kosher food to Holocaust victims. …

Jennifer Rubin also posts on the VP selection process.

If Mitt Romney goes on to win big in Tuesday’s Republican presidential primary and pile up victories in February and on Super Tuesday (March 6), the vice-presidential buzz will start in earnest. Rather than begin with names, it is more useful first to think about the considerations that go into the VP selection. Any presidential nominee is going to want someone who could assume the presidency if need be and who is trustworthy and discreet. But there are two schools of thought in vice-presidential selection.

The first is “amplification.” Bill Clinton selected Al Gore to highlight the New South, moderate-reformer message he was trying to convey. To a certain extent, Gore did the same in selecting a moderate, pro-defense Democrat, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman in 2000.

The alternative is the “balancing”approach. Barack Obama selected Joe Biden as a Washington insider, foreign policy “guru” (don’t laugh, this was his rationale) and blue-collar-friendly running mate. Likewise, George W. Bush selected the Washington-experienced, former defense secretary, Dick Cheney. …

Wired with a UCLA psyche prof with lessons on how to study better.

… “If you study and then you wait, tests show that the longer you wait, the more you will have forgotten,” Bjork said.

But here’s the cool part: If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session. Bjork explains it this way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.”

Note that there’s a trick implied by “provided the retrieval succeeds.” You should space your study sessions so that the information you learned in the first session remains just barely retrievable. Then, the more you have to work to pull it from the soup of your mind, the more this second study session will reinforce your learning. If you study again too soon, it’s too easy.

Along these lines, Bjork also recommends taking notes just after class, rather than during — forcing yourself to recall a lecture’s information is more effective than simply copying it from a blackboard. You have to work for it. The more you work, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more awesome you can become. …

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Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Prof lists the low lights of the SOTU.

Obama gave his State of the Union address almost a week ago, and there’s been time to identify the real lowlights.  It is tough to rank them, but these three stood out:

1. Obama almost completely ignored the most important threat to the state of the Union: its parlous fiscal situation.  He mentioned the issue almost in passing, and then primarily to flog his idiotic tax proposal (more on this below).  He completely ignored any discussion of entitlements, and entitlement reform.  This should be the overriding priority: addressing this issue, or not, will largely determine the future state of the Union.  It borders on the criminal for a president allegedly giving the country an honest appraisal of the state of the nation to give such short shrift to the most crucial political and economic issue of the day.  Alfred E. Newman couldn’t have done any worse.

2. He flogged his fairness and justice theme.  Get ready for a hugely divisive campaign based on these issues.  I was hoping there would have been a camera on Valerie Jarrett during these parts of the speech, just to see whether her lips moved when he gave it.

This was yet another paean to the European welfare state model, though of course he didn’t frame it that way.  But his was the “social model” rhetoric that is standard in Germany, for instance.

Which is truly staggering, given that the European model is on the brink of extinction.  They may stagger on for awhile, but that model cannot be sustained. …

WSJ editors say rather than a Buffett rule, perhaps Obama should call for a Solyndra rule.

President Obama keeps pushing the (Warren) Buffett rule that nobody making more than $1 million a year should pay less than 30% in taxes. He’d do better by the economy if he adopted a Solyndra Rule, in which no commercial energy company should receive millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies.

After the demise of Solyndra (with its $535 million loan guarantee) and Beacon Power ($43 million loan guarantee), last week saw the bankruptcy of Indiana-based lithium-ion battery maker Ener1. In 2009 an Ener1 subsidiary was awarded a grant worth up to $118 million from the Energy Department, with Vice President Joe Biden touring and touting its factory a year ago.

Like Solyndra, Ener1 was a foolhardy bet for taxpayer cash. Founded in 2002, Ener1 had not turned a profit by the time of its grant and has proceeded to hemorrhage the $55 million of the DOE money it has received to date. Its losses in fiscal 2010 were $165 million. …

Debra Saunders thinks the president has decided to do nothing.

Toward the end of his State of the Union speech, President Obama observed that Washington politicians should learn from the example of the U.S. military: “When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails.”

Obama recalled the successful Navy SEAL mission, which under his watch took out Osama bin Laden, and observed, “the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other – because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s someone behind you, watching your back.”

At first blush, it seemed like a stirring call to action. But when you look at the speech as a whole, and in context, it was a sad admission. Obama constantly carps about his lack of support from the Republican-led House. I think the president has decided that he cannot succeed in the face of political opposition. So he is not charging up those stairs.

Unless Washington walks in lockstep behind Obama, he’s not going to try to get anything done. …

And Mark Steyn has a SOTU column.

Had I been asked to deliver the State of the Union address, it would not have delayed your dinner plans:

“The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You’ve been a terrific crowd!”

I gather that Americans prefer something a little more upbeat, so one would not begrudge a speechwriter fluffing it up by holding out at least the possibility of some change of fortune, however remote. Instead, President Obama assured us at great length that nothing is going to change, not now, not never. Indeed the Union’s state – its unprecedented world-record brokeness – was not even mentioned.

If, as I was, you happened to be stuck at Gate 27 at one of the many U.S. airports laboring under the misapprehension that pumping CNN at you all evening long somehow adds to the gaiety of flight delays, you would have watched an address that gave no indication its speaker was even aware that the parlous state of our finances is an existential threat not only to the nation but to global stability. The message was, oh, sure, unemployment’s still a little higher than it should be, and student loans are kind of expensive, and the housing market’s pretty flat, but it’s nothing that a little government “investment” in green jobs and rural broadband and retraining programs can’t fix. In other words, more of the unaffordable same.

The president certainly had facts and figures at his disposal. He boasted that his regulatory reforms “will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years.” Wow. Ten billion smackeroos! That’s some savings – and in a mere half a decade! Why, it’s equivalent to what the Government of the United States borrows every 53 hours. So by midnight on Thursday, Obama had already re-borrowed all those hard-fought savings from 2017. “In the last 22 months,” said the president, “businesses have created more than 3 million jobs.” Impressive. But 125,000 new foreign workers arrive every month (officially). So we would have to have created 2,750,000 jobs in that period just to stand still.

Fortunately, most of the items in Obama’s interminable speech will never happen, any more than the federally funded bicycling helmets or whatever fancies found their way onto Bill Clinton’s extravagant shopping lists in the Nineties. …

Thomas Sowell columns on CA high speed rail.

California has a huge state debt and Washington has a huge national debt. But that does not discourage either Governor Jerry Brown or President Barack Obama from wanting to launch a very costly high-speed rail system.

Most of us might be a little skittish about spending money if we were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. But the beauty of politics is that it is all other people’s money, including among those other people generations yet unborn.

The high-speed rail system proposed for California has been envisioned as a model for similar systems elsewhere in the United States. A recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle used the high-speed rail system in Spain as an analogy for California.

Spain is about the same size as California, and has a similar population density — and population density is the key to the economic viability of mass transportation, from subways to high-speed rail.

It so happens that I have ridden on Spain’s high-speed rail system. It was very nice, especially since I did not have to pay the full costs, which were subsidized by the Spanish taxpayers.

While the Spanish government has been subsidizing the passengers on its high-speed rail system, the European Union has been subsidizing the Spanish government. Someone once said that government is the illusion that we can all live off somebody else. Spain’s high-speed rail system is not even covering its operating costs, never mind the enormous costs of setting up the system in the first place. One reason is that half the seats are empty in the high-speed trains in Spain. …

Next month Queen Elizabeth will mark 60 years on the throne. The Economist reviews five new books on her.

… as a constitutional monarch, ruling with the tacit consent of the majority, she is not the only judge of the trade-off between necessary display and indispensable discretion. The public have a say as well. Some of the queen’s closest brushes with disaster have involved a lack of visibility, most painfully in 1997 when she remained in Scotland with the royal family after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. She only returned to London after pleas from her new, young prime minister, Tony Blair (and lynch-mob demands to “Show Us You Care” from the tabloids).

The double nature of the queen—an unusually private woman with extraordinary public duties—poses a test for all who try to write about her. Including Mr Marr’s book, five new biographies have been prepared for 2012, the queen’s diamond jubilee year. The authors boast of watching the queen at work, interviewing officials from the royal household and of trawling through archives. They quote family members, friends and people with a claim to know the queen.

In the process, all five biographers wrestle with the question neatly framed by their subject herself: if to see the queen is to believe in her, what vantage point allows the most authentic experience of faith? Which queen is the most “real”, the private woman or the public figure? Each offers a different answer. …