June 17, 2012

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… The race remains 50-50. Republican demoralization after a primary campaign that blew the political equivalent of a seven-run lead has now given way to Democratic demoralization at the squandering of their subsequent post-primary advantage.

What remains is a solid, stolid, gaffe-prone challenger for whom conservatism is a second language vs. an incumbent with a record he cannot run on and signature policies — Obamacare, the stimulus, cap-and-trade — he hardly dare mention.

A quite dispiriting spectacle. And more than a bit confusing. Why, just this week the estimable Jeb Bush averred that the Republican Party had become so rigidly right-wing that today it couldn’t even nominate Ronald Reagan.

Huh? It’s about to nominate Mitt Romney, who lives a good 14 nautical miles to the left of Ronald Reagan.

Goodness. Four more months of this campaign and we will all be unhinged.

Matthew Continetti gets to the core of Obama’s failures.

I can’t be the only person in America who, at about minute 35 in President Obama’s almost hour-long “framing” speech in Cleveland Thursday, wanted to tell the president, as the Dude famously screams at Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, “You’re living in the past!”

Obama’s overly long, repetitive, and by turns self-pitying and self-congratulatory address was so soaked through with nostalgia that MSNBC should have broadcast it in sepia tones. The speech—which even the liberal Obama biographer Jonathan Alter called one of the president’s “least successful” political communications—revealed an incumbent desperately trying to replay the 2008 election. But no oratory will make up for a flawed record and a vague, fissiparous, and unappealing agenda.

The president himself forced this abrupt re-launch of his reelection campaign. After a bad week that began with terrible job numbers, proceeded to Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall, and culminated in awful fundraising news, Obama tried to recover last Friday by addressing the press on the state of the economy. Except things went horribly wrong. The president uttered six words—“the private sector is doing fine”—that not only will plague him for the rest of the campaign, but also perfectly captured his complacent attitude toward all things outside the realm of government.

The moment prompted a burst of panic throughout the Democratic hive mind, with media types clucking their tongues at the president’s campaign and party strategists questioning the salience of his message. Yesterday’s event in Ohio was thus intended to serve as a sort of domestic analogue to President Obama’s “reset” with Russia. By the looks of things, it will prove to be just as unsuccessful.

The very idea that Obama has the ability to shape his political fortunes through rhetoric is a backwards-looking myth. It is part of the pop narrative of Obama’s 2008 candidacy, in which the young freshman senator was able to rescue his moribund campaign from the evil Clinton machine by giving a single speech at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in November 2007. More likely it was Obama’s antiwar stance in an antiwar party that gave him the edge in the Iowa caucuses the following January, but that has not stopped the president or his supporters from having an almost theological attachment to his oratorical prowess. …

Politicker treats us to tweets from the White House press corps during the president’s Cleveland snore.

… All of these points have already been featured in the president’s other recent speeches. Between the pre-speech hype from the campaign, the lack of new material and the overall length of the speech reporters were clearly dissatisfied with end result. Read on for a sampling of Tweets from the political press slamming the president’s speech.

Before the speech was over, MSNBC’s Mike O’Brien begged the president to stop.

“In terms of politics, this speech could have ended about 20 minutes ago. Drive your message, take your ball, go home.” …

June 14, 2012

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John Fund reports Der Spiegel has given up on the One.

In July 2008, the leading German newsmagazine Der Spiegel couldn’t contain itself in its reporting on Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin. The coverage was rapturous.

“The people of Berlin experienced the full range of Barack Obama’s charisma on Thursday evening,” it enthused. “At times he was reserved, at others engaging. Sometimes combative, and also demanding.” Der Spiegel called him “the trans-Atlantic bridge builder” who wowed 200,000 Germans as he proved himself a “save the world orator” who would expunge the evils of the unpopular Bush administration.

My, how times have changed. This week — almost exactly four years later — Der Spiegel is back with a cover story featuring a glum and dejected Obama: “Sad,” the headline reads. “Obama’s Unlucky Presidency.” …

Andrew Malcolm reports on the campaign.

President Obama today is — what else? – fundraising again.

But while he’s out, Gallup released a seriously ominous poll for the Democrat’s chances of keeping his extended family in the White House for four more years.

Gallup finds a deep crack in Obama support emerging among whites, still statistically by far the largest group of voters. His support among several white subgroups is down 5% now among registered voters from what it was just before the 2008 election, when he easily defeated John McCain.

These sub-sets of non-Hispanic whites include young registered voters between 18 and 29, which provided him a huge margin four years ago, well-educated women and non-religious whites, among others. Other research has shown huge percentages of Obama’s money donors from 2008 withholding their money this time.

Obama’s support among registered voters today is 46%, five points below what it was nearly four years ago. Whites’ support is down slightly more, six points, from 44% to 38%.

Obama’s support among blacks, while still overwhelming, has also dipped four points from 91% to 87%.

This unwelcome news for the Chicago political operation comes after a horrendous two weeks of gaffes, bad jobs news and unforced errors by the politician once known here as the Real Good Talker. …

Andrew Ferguson reviews two of the new Obama books and ends up reviewing Obama’s first book too.

… the only way to keep a book like The Amateur chugging along is with gallons of high-octane contempt. Yet because Klein provides so little to provoke fresh outrage?—?or to support the theme that Obama is “something new in American politics,” a historically unprecedented threat to the Republic?—?readers will have to come to the book well-stocked with outrage of their own. They will be satisfied with sentences that begin with an appeal to phony-baloney authority (“According to those who know him best”) and continue with assertions that no Obama intimate would make to Edward Klein, on or off the record: “inept in the arts of management .??.??. make[s] our economy less robust and our nation less safe .??.??.” and so on. And they’ll admire his ability to fit his theme of Obama’s villainy to any set of facts. After his election, for example, Obama didn’t take a wise man’s advice to disregard his old Chicago friends?—?a sign of Obama’s weakness and amateurism, Klein says. A few pages later Obama and Valerie Jarrett are accused of ignoring their old Chicago friends?—?a sign of coldness and amateurism. Klein gets him coming and going.

If Klein makes Obama something he’s not by hating him more than he should, David Maraniss, a reporter for the Washington Post and a biographer of Bill Clinton and Vince Lombardi, takes the opposite approach. Klein is an Obama despiser, Maraniss is a big fan?—?big fan. Klein assumes the worst of his subject at every turn, Maraniss gives Obama every benefit of the doubt, sometimes with heroic effort. Klein writes hastily and crudely, Maraniss writes with great care, veering now and then into those pastures of purple prose that Obama frequently trod in his own memoir. Klein’s book aims for a limited but sizable audience of readers who already despise Obama as much as he does, and therefore don’t require footnotes or any other apparatus of verification; Maraniss, with 30 pages of notes, has grander ambitions to satisfy anyone curious about Obama’s upbringing and family life. Klein’s book is a squalid little thing, Maraniss’s is not.

It is not, however, the book that Obama lovers will hope for?—?maybe not the book that Maraniss thinks it is. Prepublication, his splashiest piece of news has been the extent of the future president’s love for, and consumption of, marijuana. Through high school?—?he apparently lost the taste for pot sometime in college?—?Obama’s ardor reached Cheech and Chong levels. His circle of dopers called themselves the “Choom Gang,” after a Hawaiian word for inhaling pot, and the phrase is already threatening to enter the common language, ironically or otherwise. (I Googled it today and got 560,000 hits, pardon the expression.)

Obama politically indemnified himself against charges of youthful drug use by admitting them in his memoir, though he was smart enough to avoid the words “Choom Gang.” Even at 33, when he wrote his book, he had his eye on a political landscape that would require acknowledgment if not full disclosure of youthful “experimentation,” as the charming euphemism went. In Dreams, he treats the drug use as another symptom of his singular youthful confusion. Maraniss’s explanation is less complicated: Obama really, really liked to get high. Maraniss offers similarly unblinkered portraits of Obama’s appalling father, a vain, wife-beating bigamist and drunk, and of Obama’s maternal grandfather, who comes off in Dreams as a latter-day Micawber, innocent and luckless. Maraniss hints at a darker, even slightly menacing figure. And he discovers some sharp edges beneath the flowing muumuu of Obama’s mother, more often depicted as an idealistic flower-child-turned-scholar (or, in the Klein-reading camp, a Communist agitator).

Maraniss’s book is most interesting for the light it casts on Obama’s self-invention, which is of course the theme of Dreams from My Father: a sensitive and self-aware young man’s zig-zagging search for a personal identity in a world barely held together by fraying family ties, without a cultural inheritance, confused and tormented by the subject of race. Dreams is a cascade of epiphanies, touched off one by one in high school, at Oxy, in New York and Chicago, and, at book’s end, before his father’s grave in Africa. Years before Obama haters could inflate him into an America-destroying devil or Obama worshippers spied those rolling swells of greatness that have yet to surface, Barack Obama was carefully fashioning from his own life something grander than what was there. He was the first Obama fabulist.

Obama himself drops hints of this in Dreams. He writes in his introduction that the dialogue in the book is only an “approximation” of real conversations. Some of the characters, “for the sake of compression,” are “composites”; the names of others have been changed. All of this is offered to the reader as acceptable literary license, and it is, certainly by the standards of the early 1990s, back in the day when publishers flooded bookstores with memoirs of angst-ridden youth and there were still bookstores to flood. Yet the epiphany-per-page ratio in Obama’s memoir is very high. The book derives its power from the reader’s understanding that the events described were factual at least in the essentials. Maraniss demonstrates something else: The writer who would later use the power of his life story to become a plausible public man was making it up, to an alarming extent. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: At a news conference Obama says the economy is doing just fine. In fact, 14 million people were able to watch the news conference at home because they’re unemployed.

Leno: A new book says Barack Obama smoked huge amounts of marijuana in high school. New unemployment numbers are higher than Obama was in high school.

Fallon: Joe Biden’s daughter was married in a ceremony that incorporated Jewish traditions. But Biden wouldn’t wear the yarmulke til they put a propeller on top.

Fallon: Obama spent Friday night at his Chicago home. But there was an awkward moment the next day. When he left for D.C., the housekeeper said, ‘So, see you after the election?’

June 13, 2012

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Roger Simon says be happy you’re not Binyamin Netanyahu.

Who would want to be Benjamin Netanyahu? As the prime minister of Israel he has a dreadful calculus to make: Is Barack Obama sufficiently serious about preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? …

… He is staring at an American election that must give him fits. Were Barack Obama – the man who said those “flattering” things about him to ex-French President Sarkozy – to be reelected in November, the Israeli PM’s hands might be tied in a myriad of ways with a myriad of threats.

His window to act is now. One can only wish him luck.

David Harsanyi says create wealth, not jobs.

… the context of President Obama’s remark is simple: He believes that public-sector jobs are a vital measure of economic growth. This is the prevalent view from the left these days. “Everybody knows that government creates jobs,” lied Sen. Sherrod Brown recently. Liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne quipped that when conservatives say “government doesn’t create jobs,” “the riposte should be quick and emphatic: ‘Yes it has, and yes, it does!‘” (And really, how can anyone argue with that kind of ironclad logic?)

It’s ironic that the same people pushing unsustainable job growth find the process of wealth creation so unsightly. Not long ago, Obama and others on the left were busy attacking private equity, claiming that some people are good at “maximizing profits” but that that’s not always “good for businesses or communities or workers.” (Actually, it almost always is.)

But pumping money into public-sector unions is always good for businesses, communities and workers? Obama is peddling a “jobs” bill right now that features one pinch of protectionism, one pinch of feel-good veteran help and a few hundred cups’ worth of wealth-sucking, union-growing debt inducement. Can anyone name a single policy proposal by his administration that even pretends to clear the way for private-sector wealth creation?

In context, the entire focus of the president is warped — not simply because he underestimated the health of the private sector but because he believes that any other sector matters when talking about the economy. It doesn’t.

Michael Barone says the president makes a mistake listening to rich liberals. Pickerhead says, “Keep it up. Barry, suits us fine.”

Who does Barack Obama listen to?

Not Republican politicians. Evidently weeks go by between his conversations with House Speaker John Boehner, who determines what legislation comes to the House floor.

Not Democratic politicians. We have it on good authority that he seldom talks to Democratic members of Congress. Lyndon Johnson used to be on the phone constantly, cajoling and inveigling but also on the alert for shifts in opinion.

Speaker Tip O’Neill walked around the Capitol, asking member after member, “What do you hear?” In contrast, Obama, a former adviser told Vanity Fair‘s Todd Purdum, “is a total introvert. He doesn’t need people.”

But there is one group of people Obama has to listen to: the people who give him large sums of money. He recently attended his 150th fundraiser. That’s more than the number attended by the last four presidents put together.

Obama has seen enough Architectural Digest-type interiors in Park Avenue triplexes and Beverly Hills mansions, and on the block in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, where every house is owned by a billionaire, to develop an expertise in Louis XV walnut commodes and Brunschwig & Fils fabrics.

He’s also had plenty of chances to absorb the advice of the kind of rich liberals who like to give money to Democratic presidents. And the evidence that he has taken some of that advice is his initiatives on three controversial issues, each of which involves serious political risk. …

Matthew Continetti reviews Road to Freedom by Arthur Brooks.

Will Smith was about to be surprised.

It was mid-May, and the actor was appearing on French television to promote his latest blockbuster. The host wanted to hear the Fresh Prince’s thoughts not only on Men in Black III but also on American tax rates. “I have no issue with paying taxes and whatever needs to be done for my country to grow,” Smith said. “So I will pay anything that I need to pay to keep my country growing.”

Even the 75 percent top rate proposed by the newly elected French president François Hollande, the host asked? Smith’s movie-star grin contorted in disgust: “Seventy-five?” he said. “Yeah, that’s different.” He looked from side to side, perhaps wondering if President Obama was lurking off-camera to punish him for such apostasy. “That’s different. Yeah, 75. Well, you know, God bless America.”

Will Smith reacted viscerally because a top tax rate of 75 percent offended his sense of justice. It might be right, in his view, for the government to take 30 or 40 percent of a rich person’s earnings, but taking 75 percent would not be right at all. It would be wrong. Unjust.

One of the virtues of Arthur Brooks’s new book on the morality of free enterprise is that it supplies empirical support for Smith’s intuitive reaction. The Road to Freedom is personal and idiosyncratic, filled with autobiographical asides, references to the author’s wife and children, corny jokes, and the occasional pop culture allusion. But it also has a serious intent. Brooks attempts to prove, scientifically, the “moral legitimacy of free enterprise” by testing whether the system “enables people to flourish,” whether it is fair, and how it “treats the least fortunate in society.” He argues that free enterprise passes all three tests, and he makes a good case.

Consider human flourishing. Ex–panding on arguments he made in The Battle (2010), Brooks says that high tax rates are wrong not only because they damage the economy, but also because they violate the principle of earned success. You are more likely to be happy, he observes, when you create “value with your life or in the lives of others,” and the happiness of the people ought to be the goal of any society that aspires to morality. …

… Work is what takes us from learned helplessness or dependence to earned success and independence. Through public policy, governments and societies affect how much we work, and for what reason, and for whose benefit. Government can pay us not to work, or it can tax our labor and incomes and investments to such an extent that we do not work harder on the margin. Not only do we make less money; we lose some of our sense of self-worth. We lose our right to labor, and to the benefits of our labor. Jefferson, Lincoln, and Reagan understood: Governments that assert a claim to a citizen’s property will have no trouble asserting a claim to his conscience as well. It cannot be a coincidence that the Obama administration, which wants to “spread the wealth around,” also coerces religious institutions to provide contraceptives and abortifacients to employees. In both cases, Barack Obama believes his vision of the good trumps the equal rights of others.

Read The Road to Freedom for its explication of earned success, its definition of meritocratic fairness, and its moral commitment to using free exchange to improve the lives of the destitute. But don’t forget that the moral truths that animate this admirable book, and others, cannot be found in economics or statistics or social science. They are found in the individual dignity of every human being, and in the natural equality of man. Will Smith’s ability to pursue happiness does not depend on our 35 percent top tax rate. It depends on the depth of our commitment to the vision of the Founders.

Jeff Jacoby says the end is near for public sector unions.

In retrospect, there were two conspicuous giveaways that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was headed for victory in last week’s recall election.

One was that the Democrats’ campaign against him wound up focusing on just about everything but Walker’s law limiting collective bargaining rights for government workers. Sixteen months ago, the Capitol building in Madison was besieged by rioting protesters hell-bent on blocking the changes by any means necessary. Union members and their supporters, incandescent with rage, likened Walker to Adolph Hitler and cheered as Democratic lawmakers fled the state in a bid to force the legislature to a standstill. Once the bill passed, unions and Democrats vowed revenge, and amassed a million signatures on recall petitions.

But the more voters saw of the law’s effects, the more they liked it. Dozens of school districts reported millions in savings, most without resorting to layoffs. Property taxes fell. A $3.6 billion state budget deficit turned into a $154 million projected surplus. Walker’s measures proved a tonic for the economy, and support for restoring the status quo ante faded — even among Wisconsin Democrats. Long before Election Day, Democratic challenger Tom Barrett had all but dropped the issue of public-sector collective bargaining from his campaign to replace Walker.

The second harbinger was the plunge in public-employee union membership. The most important of Walker’s reforms, the change Big Labor had fought most bitterly, was ending the automatic withholding of union dues. That made union membership a matter of choice, not compulsion — and tens of thousands of government workers chose to toss their union cards. …

June 12, 2012

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Jennifer Rubin has words for a president who has a love affair with government.

The president’s news conference belly-flop Friday was a killer on two levels. Obviously, the private sector is not doing fine, as Obama admitted later in the day when he tried to walk back the remark. (But if it’s not doing fine is he to blame? No! That’s 2E and 2F.) But the rest of his message — that it’s good to keep growing the public sector — won’t be walked back. That is what he believes and why his comments, coupled with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in last week’s recall election, spell big trouble for him. …

… President Obama seems unaware that we need the private sector to generate wealth (you know, make things, sell things, etc.) or that we face in the near future a fiscal crisis when we can no longer off-load our debt. Where does he think the money to pay for an ever-expanding public employee workforce comes from? (“The fair if depressing takeaway from Mr. Obama’s press conference is that he continues to believe, despite three and a half years of failure, that more government spending is the key to faster growth and that government really doesn’t need to reform. This is how you get a jobless rate above 8% for 40 months and the weakest economic recovery in 60 years.”) …

Andrew Malcolm says the White House has a new economic advisor – Wile E. Coyote.

One of the immutable rules of politics is that if you have to explain something you’ve said publicly, the argument is already lost. “What I was trying to say was….”

Loser!

In that sense President Obama was strategically wise Friday afternoon not to try to somehow explain his morning jaw-dropper about the private U.S. economic sector doing just fine with the real unemployment rate above 14%. Instead, the Democrat simply contradicted himself. Create a new quotable reality. The Chicago way.

Morning: “The private sector is doing just fine.”

Afternoon: “It is absolutely clear that the economy is not doing fine.”

Dissembling doesn’t faze him. Pretending just might work. Which Obama do you believe? Increasingly, neither. The president’s latest gaffe is, as another high-ranking Democrat would put it, a big #$%&*+@ deal because:

1) It came as Obama gives the consistent week-after-week impression that he’s much more interested in raising millions at campaign fundraisers (13 in just 3 “work” days) than lowering the unemployed ranks by millions,

2) It adds to the impression that a lost Obama, distracted by Mitt Romney’s surprising early strengths, is kinda panicked, will say almost anything to make it true and easily slips off-script with silly, immediately refutable statements. …

John Hinderaker thinks it is “Obama’s most clueless moment yet. ”

President Obama’s seemingly-bizarre claim that “the private sector is doing fine” is echoing across the country. When I first saw the quote, I thought it must be a momentary gaffe, or perhaps taken out of context. But no: Obama really did say, at some length, that the private sector is prospering and we need to spend more money on government:

“The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, Governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.

And so, you know, if Republicans want to be helpful, if they really want to move forward and put people back to work, what they should be thinking about is how do we help state and local governments and how do we help the construction industry? …”

George Will gets on to the student debt crisis.

… Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, believes that college has become, for many, merely a “status marker,” signaling membership in the educated caste, and a place to meet spouses of similar status — “associative mating.” Since 1961, the time students spend reading, writing and otherwise studying has fallen from 24 hours a week to about 15 — enough for a degree often desired only as an expensive signifier of rudimentary qualities (e.g., the ability to follow instructions). Employers value this signifier as an alternative to aptitude tests when evaluating potential employees because such tests can provoke lawsuits by having a “disparate impact” on this or that racial or ethnic group.

In his “The Higher Education Bubble,” Reynolds writes that this bubble exists for the same reasons the housing bubble did. The government decided that too few people owned homes/went to college, so government money was poured into subsidized and sometimes subprime mortgages/student loans, with the predictable result that housing prices/college tuitions soared and many borrowers went bust. Tuitions and fees have risen more than 440 percent in 30 years as schools happily raised prices — and lowered standards — to siphon up federal money. A recent Wall Street Journal headline: “Student Debt Rises by 8% as College Tuitions Climb.”

Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist, writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that as many people — perhaps more — have student loan debts as have college degrees. Have you seen those T-shirts that proclaim “College: The Best Seven Years of My Life”? Twenty-nine percent of borrowers never graduate, and many who do graduate take decades to repay their loans. …

Joe Nocera, of the NY Times, points to another area where college administrators have failed.

The lead article in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week is about a University of Memphis football player named Dasmine Cathey. He lives not on campus but in his aunt’s home nearby, where he helps raise his siblings, who were essentially abandoned by their mother. He has two children of his own (with different mothers). He uses his Pell grant money to help pay the household bills and often skips class because he has to drive a family member somewhere. It’s a lot for a college student to shoulder, but he doesn’t shirk it.

College itself, however, is a different story. As an incoming freshman, Cathey could barely read, and academics remain a chore. His papers — a handful of which are posted on the Chronicle’s Web site — seem more like the work of a seventh grader than a college student. Among the courses he has failed are Family Communication and Yoga. His major is called “interdisciplinary studies.” As the article ends, the athletic department’s academic advisers are desperately trying to get him to go to class so he can graduate.

So while the article, written by Brad Wolverton, causes one to root for Cathey, who is a largely sympathetic figure, it also, inevitably, raises the question: How in the world did he get into college? But, of course, we know the answer to that. He is in college because, as one of his former coaches puts it, “He had all the tools you could ask for.” Football tools, that is. …

UC Santa Cruz prof on the trap of minority studies.

When Naomi Schaefer Riley was fired by the Chronicle of Higher Education for her trenchant remarks on Black Studies programs, most of those who criticized the firing saw in it a display of the campus left’s intolerance. Fair enough, but this episode also has a much broader meaning.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large populations of poor immigrants arrived in the U.S.–Irish, Italians, and Jews from Russia and Poland. Their extreme poverty placed them at the bottom of the social ladder, and they were often treated with contempt. Yet just a few generations later they were assimilated, and their rapid upward social mobility had produced mayors, senators, judges, and even Presidents from among their ranks. None of this could have happened without first-rate public education.

To be sure, they worked hard to get ahead, but they were not obstructed by something that afflicts the have-nots of today: as they walked through the school gates they were not met by people intent on luring them into Irish or Italian Studies programs whose purpose was to keep them in a state of permanent resentment over past wrongs at the hands of either Europeans or establishment America. …

June 11, 2012

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Mark Steyn writes on the president whose name soon will be the punch line for a thousand jokes.

Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Diamond Jubilee a few days ago – that’s 60 years on the throne. Just to put it in perspective, she’s been queen since Harry S. Truman was president. At any rate, her jubilee has been a huge success, save for a few churlish republicans in various corners of Her Majesty’s realms from London to Toronto to Sydney pointing out how absurd it is for grown citizens to be fawning over a distant head of state who lives in a fabulous, glittering cocoon entirely disconnected from ordinary life.

Which brings us to President Obama.

Last week, the republic’s citizen-president passed among his fellow Americans. Where? Cleveland? Dubuque? Presque Isle, Maine? No, Beverly Hills. These days, it’s pretty much always Beverly Hills or Manhattan, because that’s where the money is. That’s the Green Zone, and you losers are outside it. Appearing at an Obama fundraiser at the home of “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy and his fiancé David Miller, the president, reasonably enough, had difficulty distinguishing one A-list Hollywood summit from another. “I just came from a wonderful event over at the Wilshire or the Hilton – I’m not sure which,” said Obama, “because you go through the kitchens of all these places, and so you never are quite sure where you are.”

Ah, the burdens of stardom. …

Neal Boortz analyzes Clinton’s apology.

For the past 18 hours or so I’ve been watching various pundits try to analyze Bill Clinton’s so-called “apology” to Barack Obama? Apology for what? Apology for suggesting that now, while we’re in a recession and trying to find the key to growing our economy, might not be a good time to raise taxes on the rich. So naturally the Obama people contacted the Clinton people to ask them just what in the hell they’re trying to do? Obama’s one constant theme since he was sworn in is that the rich – the people who pay the bulk of the income taxes in this country – need to pay more because, after all, they have money they don’t “need.” Obama even went so far at one point as to say that he didn’t want to live in a country that would “allow him” to keep this money that he has earned that he didn’t really need. And then along comes Clinton to say that now would be a bad time to raise taxes on these people?

So yesterday, Clinton apologizes. …

Ed Morrissey posts on Lanny Davis’ remarks about the “vicious people” working for the president.

Via BuzzFeed and Matt Lewis, here’s the latest in blue-on-blue political warfare from Lanny Davis, literally one of Bill Clinton’s most ardent defenders. Davis presented the defense during Clinton’s impeachment trial and has been loyal to both Clinton and the Democrats for decades. At some point this week, those loyalties ceased to be redundant as the Obama team humiliated the former President and even had Clinton’s own team insinuating that he might be a little too old to be taken seriously any longer — at age 65. An Obama administration official told the New York Post that Newark Mayor Cory Booker was “dead to us” despite humbling himself in what was widely panned as a “hostage video” after contradicting the Obama campaign’s Bain Capital-”vampire capitalist” strategy.

Speaking yesterday on “America’s Radio News Network,” Davis blasted Obama’s teams in the administration and the campaign, and wondered where they’d find any friends after this week:

“You have vicious people who are working for the president …”

Thomas Sowell on the real war against women.

Among the people who are disappointed with President Obama, none has more reason to be disappointed than those who thought he was going to be “a uniter, rather than a divider” and that he would “bring us all together.”

It was a noble hope, but one with no factual foundation. Barack Obama had been a divider all his adult life, especially as a community organizer, and he had repeatedly sought out and allied himself with other dividers, the most blatant of whom was the man whose church he attend for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.

Now, with his presidency on the line and the polls looking dicey, President Obama’s re-election campaign has become more openly divisive than ever.

He has embraced the strident “Occupy Wall Street” movement, with its ridiculous claim of representing the 99 percent against the 1 percent. Obama’s Department of Justice has been spreading the hysteria that states requiring photo identification for voting are trying to keep minorities from voting, and using the prevention of voter fraud as a pretext.

But anyone who doubts the existence of voter fraud should read John Fund’s book “Stealing Elections” or J. Christian Adams’s book, “Injustice,” which deals specifically with the Obama Justice Department’s overlooking voter fraud when those involved are black Democrats. …

Investors.com on what caused the slow recovery.

Whenever the subject of the weak economic recovery under President Obama comes up, his defenders tend to respond along the lines of: “What do you expect, since the recession was the worst since the Great Depression?”

It’s an argument the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers made last week, after the U.S. created just 69,000 jobs in May, and unemployment remained stuck above 8% for the 40th month in a row.

“There is much more work that remains to be done to repair the damage caused by the financial crisis and deep recession,” wrote Alan Krueger.

Obama himself has used this excuse. “From the moment we first took action to prevent another Great Depression, we knew the road to recovery would not be easy; we knew it would take time,” he said last week.

But the history of economic cycles suggests that the exact opposite should have happened.

“Typically following a recession, the economy rebounds strongly,” Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Lacker noted in the bank’s quarterly journal.

What’s more, deeper recessions tend to produce strong recoveries.

“You can’t find a single deep recession that has been followed by a moderate recovery,” Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Capital, said back in August 2009.

David Harsanyi makes a point about the headlines claiming Walker “survived” the recall election.

The Wisconsin “survival” election:

Scott Walker – 53 percent

Tom Barrett – 46 percent

The 2008 audacious Barack Obama presidential election – AKA: “historic blowout victory,” ”a national catharsis,” “landslide,” etc…

Barack Obama – 53 percent

John McCain – 46 percent

June 10, 2012

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Charles Krauthammer knows the real reason the unions fought so hard against Walker’s reforms.

… The real threat behind all this, however, was that the new law ended automatic government collection of union dues. That was the unexpressed and politically inexpressible issue. That was the reason the unions finally decided to gamble on a high-risk recall.

Without the thumb of the state tilting the scale by coerced collection, union membership became truly voluntary. Result? Newly freed members rushed for the exits. In less than one year, AFSCME, the second-largest public-sector union in Wisconsin, has lost more than 50 percent of its membership.

It was predictable. In Indiana, where Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) instituted by executive order a similar reform seven years ago, government-worker unions have since lost 91 percent of their dues-paying membership. In Wisconsin, Democratic and union bosses (a redundancy) understood what was at stake if Walker prevailed: not benefits, not “rights,” but the very existence of the unions.

So they fought and they lost. Repeatedly. Tuesday was their third and last shot at reversing Walker’s reforms. In April 2011, they ran a candidate for chief justice of the state Supreme Court who was widely expected to strike down the law. She lost.

In July and August 2011, they ran recall elections of state senators, needing three to reclaim Democratic — i.e., union — control. They failed. (The likely flipping of one Senate seat to the Democrats on June 5 is insignificant. The Senate is not in session and won’t be until after yet another round of elections in November.)

And then, Tuesday, their Waterloo. Walker defeated their gubernatorial candidate by a wider margin than he had — pre-reform — two years ago.

The unions’ defeat marks a historical inflection point. They set out to make an example of Walker. He succeeded in making an example of them as a classic case of reactionary liberalism. …

And Peggy Noonan has a stunningly good column on the meaning of Wisconsin.

What happened in Wisconsin signals a shift in political mood and assumption. Public employee unions were beaten back and defeated in a state with a long progressive tradition. The unions and their allies put everything they had into “one of their most aggressive grass-roots campaigns ever,” as the Washington Post’s Peter Whoriskey and Dan Balz reported in a day-after piece. Fifty thousand volunteers made phone calls and knocked on 1.4 million doors to get out the vote against Gov. Scott Walker. Mr. Walker’s supporters, less deeply organized on the ground, had a considerable advantage in money. …

… Mr. Walker was not crushed. He was buoyed, winning by a solid seven points in a high-turnout race. …

… President Obama’s problem now isn’t what Wisconsin did, it’s how he looks each day—careening around, always in flight, a superfluous figure. No one even looks to him for leadership now. He doesn’t go to Wisconsin, where the fight is. He goes to Sarah Jessica Parker’s place, where the money is.

There is, now, a house-of-cards feel about this administration. …

… And where is the president in all this? On his way to Anna Wintour’s house. He’s busy. He’s running for president.

But why? He could be president now if he wanted to be. …

Michael Barone drills into the Wisconsin numbers.

Here are some observations from the election results in the Wisconsin recall race. For the results I’ve used the convenient interactive maps provided by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Huffington Post. When you look at the map, you notice that Democrat Tom Barrett won only in a relatively few counties, 12 of 72. He was reduced to the Democratic base: Madison and a few surrounding counties, the central city of Milwaukee but definitely not the suburbs, a few old factory towns like LaCrosse and Stevens Point, three counties up on Lake Superior near Duluth, Minnesota, and the Menominee Indian Reservation. Everything else went for Scott Walker.

Turnout in this election was really high: 2,507,269, compared to 2,160,832 in November 2010 and closer to the 2,984,417 in November 2008. Much has been made of the exit poll finding that union members were one-third of the total, up from 2010, but we see evidence of this in county returns as well. Turnout was up 16% statewide, but it was up 20% in Kenosha County and in Douglas County (Superior) which have had lots of blue collar voters. Walker’s percentage as compared to 2010 declined 6.2% in Douglas County, more than in any other county in the state, and Kenosha County was one of the few counties Walker carried in 2010 but lost in 2012. Turnout was up 16% in Milwaukee County, suggesting that black turnout was fairly robust, and up 15% in Dane County (Madison), the epicenter of anti-Walker forces and up 22% and 25% in adjacent Columbia and Dodge Counties, which were two of the 16 counties where Walker’s percentage fell from 2010 to 2012. One has visions of Madison Occupy-types heading out to canvass in rural areas nearby. Conclusion: the union and leftish Democrats did a good job of turning out their voters. It was like the 2004 presidential race in Ohio, where the Kerry forces did a great job turning out voters in central cities, but were still beaten because there was also heavy turnout in small and medium-sized counties of strongly motivated Republican voters. Such was the case in Wisconsin.

Walker’s percentage rose most in small counties in the northwestern quadrant of the state and near Green Bay. These were mostly Barack Obama territory in 2008; the rise in Walker percentage suggests that confrontational tactics hurt Democrats there (as I speculated in a blogpost last night) and they might hurt Obama there as well.

In Friday’s presser, the president said the private sector was “doing fine.” James Pethokoukis begs to differ.

… But is it really? Is the private sector “doing fine?”

1. Private-sector jobs have increased by an average of just 105,000 over the past three months and by just 89,000 a month during the entire Obama Recovery.

In 1983 and 1984, during the supply-side Reagan Boom, private sector jobs increased by an average of 292,000 a month. Adjusted for population, that number is more like 375,000 private-sector jobs a month

2. If the labor force participation rate for May had just stayed where it was in April, the unemployment rate would have risen to 8.4%. As it is, the U.S. economy is suffering is longest sustained bout of 8% unemployment or higher since the Great Depression. …

Pethokoukis again posts on the remark later in the day.

… The remark reveals the government-centered nature of Obama’s thinking. He just doesn’t give private enterprise very much thought, particularly when it comes to all the ways government can muck up the free enterprise system. To Obama, the private sector is always “doing fine,” so it really doesn’t matter if the public sector overloads it with too many taxes and too much regulation. The private sector? Oh, you means guys like Bain Capital who like to fire people.

No wonder there’s been so little sense of urgency by the Obama White House to cut the sky-high corporate tax rate or so little consideration given to the impact on small business of letting the Bush tax cuts expire. The private sector is “doing fine,” after all. Unintended consequences? What are those?

Approve the Keystone pipeline? Why? The environment comes first, especially at a time when the private sector is “doing fine.”

The private sector isn’t just millionaire CEOs of America’s largest companies. It’s also workers (who bear most of the burden of high corporate taxes) and investors and entrepreneurs. …

David Harsanyi tells us why we love Miss USA.

The cartoonists have fun with Wisconsin.

June 7, 2012

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The optimism of the Wisconsin vote needs to make way for a warning from Peter Schiff.

… In recent months as turmoil bubbled across the debt markets of Europe, the United States had beckoned as a safe haven. But in truth, the problems are as bad, if not worse, on this side of the Atlantic. Ironically, America has not had to deal with its day of reckoning because lesser problems surfaced first in Europe. But when Europe comes to some modest resolution of its problems, or when bond investors realize they have jumped from the frying pan into the fire, there will be no hiding from the unresolved problems here.

As the intoxicating effects of Fed stimulus wear off, the hangover is setting in. To delay the pain, I believe that there can be little doubt that the Fed will unleash its next round of stimulus, in the form of QE3. My guess is the Fed has always known more QE was needed but it has been waiting for the most politically palatable time to announce it. That “stunner” can’t be far off with the data so bad and the elections so near.

Eventually more people will figure out just how precarious America’s fiscal position truly remains. That’s when interest rates will finally rise in the U.S. There is no way to justify record low interest rates in this country given our atrocious fiscal position. I believe interest rates here should approach levels comparable to the more indebted European countries. Once it becomes obvious just how many dollars the Fed is prepared to print to stave off recession, people running into treasuries today will likely suffer buyer’s remorse. When they rethink their assumptions, as buyers of the Facebook IPO clearly have, the Fed will then become not just the buyer of last resort, but the buyer of only resort. Then the Real Crash may finally be upon us.

Now back to the optimism; courtesy of Jennifer Rubin.

I distinctly recall in college reading Jean Francois Revel’s “The Totalitarian Temptation” and thinking, “Well that’s it. The Commies will win — too many dim people in the West.” Communism, however, crumbled in large part because very undim people, including Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, were optimists and staunch defenders of freedom.

So when conservatives today argue that we haven’t the fortitude to defeat Islamic terrorists or to put our fiscal house in order, I am not despondent. Quite the contrary, there is great reason to be optimistic. In fact, there are lots of reasons to be. I’ve got my list:

1. With yesterday’s win, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) showed that self-governance, the ability and will to grasp the reins of power from the few and tame our institutions, is possible.

2. It is becoming conventional wisdom, from the center-left to the center-right, that President Obama blew it when he chose to reject the Simpson-Bowles committee’s recommendations. …

Andrew Malcolm asks why Walker won so big?

“Win” is too small a word for what Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker pulled off Tuesday. So, probably, is victory.

In a referendum on the first half of his first term, the Republican became the first governor in U.S. history to defeat an attempt to oust him from office. The other two recall efforts — against California’s Gray Davis in 2003 and North Dakota’s Lynn Frazier in 1921 –were successful.

Exit polls discovered a significant number of Wisconsin voters bothered by the union-led recall bid for something short of improper conduct. While others were impressed by Walker’s budget surplus and billion dollar in state savings already. And Walker’s national party reputation wasn’t hurt either.

With 99% of the votes counted, Walker received 53% (1,326,658) to Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s 46% (1,150,233) and 1% for a third candidate.

But those numbers understate Walker’s success. He took 60 of the state’s 72 counties and beat Barrett by two more points than he did in 2010. Walker’s lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, also defeated a recall bid. …

Josh Kraushaar spots bad news for the prez in yesterday’s results.

President Obama wasn’t on the ballot in Wisconsin, but Gov. Scott Walker’s decisive victory in last night’s gubernatorial recall is a stinging blow to his prospects for a second term. The re-election was a telltale sign that the conservative base is as energized as ever, that the Democratic GOTV efforts may not be as stellar as advertised, and that the Democratic-leaning “blue wall” Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania will be very much in play this November.

Politico catches Clinton once again trashing Obama’s campaign message.

Last week, former President Bill Clinton disavowed a central theme of President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. Tuesday, he added that a key piece of the White House’s policy agenda doesn’t make much sense to him either.

With friends like this, Obama’s political enemies don’t need to do too much.

In an interview with CNBC that his office was scrambling to clarify Tuesday night, Clinton sided with congressional Republicans over Obama in calling for Congress to temporarily renew the soon-to-expire Bush tax cuts — but he also heaped praise on private equity companies like Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, pleaded ignorance for his past gaffes and asserted his independence from the Obama campaign message operation.

It was Clinton in full Mr. Hyde mode — in a flashback to the deep and lasting tensions between the Clinton family and the Obama team that still linger from the bitter 2008 primary fight.

The interview was part of a whirlwind television tour Tuesday afternoon, with Clinton spending also granting interviews to NBC, PBS and CBS that followed up on his turn last week on CNN, when he referred to Romney’s business background — which the Obama campaign had spent days tearing apart — as “sterling.” Once again, Clinton was sucking up all the media oxygen and generating dozens of headlines about an intra-party split between the two presidents.

It took Hillary Clinton’s campaign a good part of the 2008 primary season to realize the damage that the former president’s straight talking, can’t-be-muzzled ways could do — after he helped sink his own wife’s chances at the presidency in advance of the South Carolina primary by alienating black voters. It took the Obama campaign only one week to learn the same lesson, as Clinton swung wildly between effective surrogate and major headache.

Talking about the economic crisis in Europe and the persistent economic malaise in the United States, Clinton told CBNC that extending the Bush-era tax cuts across the board was “probably the best thing to do right now.”

Obama has made raising taxes on upper earners a signature part of his reelection pitch — and Republicans were quick to exploit the daylight between the two Democratic presidents. …

WSJ OpEd notes the administration’s hard time at the Court this year.

As the world awaits the Supreme Court’s ruling on ObamaCare, there’s a larger story that the pundits are missing: the court’s rejection of the Obama administration’s increasingly extreme claims on behalf of unlimited federal power.

This term alone, the high court has ruled unanimously against the government on religious liberty, criminal procedure and property rights. When the administration can’t get even a single one of the liberal justices to agree with it in these unrelated areas of the law, that’s a sign there’s something wrong with its constitutional vision.

Let’s take these cases in order:

First, in Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the government sued a church school that fired a teacher for violating one of the church’s religious tenets: threatening to sue over an employment dispute rather than resolving the disagreement internally. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claimed this violated the Americans with Disabilities Act because the firing was related to the teacher’s health issues.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in January that punishing a church for failing to retain an unwanted teacher “interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs.” Such interference, it concluded, violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. …

Roger Simon compares Elizabeth Warren to another Ms. Warren, the madam in one of Bernard Shaw’s plays; Mrs. Warren’s Profession.

… Warren can be an Indian if she wishes; she can exploit bank foreclosures if she wishes. Eliot Spitzer can bust hookers while employing them and end up with a television show. Who knows — Elizabeth may end up with her own reality show now, her own version of “Flip This House” called “Flip This Tepee”?

It’s their profession — modern liberalism. They can be capitalists while the rest of us rot under taxes and government regulation. Socialism for thee but not for me.

And it pays better than the original Mrs. Warren’s. You can even get tenure at Harvard, no questions asked. Just check the right identity square. No one will know. And if they suspect, they can’t prove anything. After all, ancestors.com only goes so far.

USA Today OpEd in high dungeon over fake Indian claims.

… For several years, Warren falsely identified herself as a Native American — a designation that raises serious questions about how such a misrepresentation might have advantaged her in obtaining a professorship at the Harvard Law School at a time when it was being attacked for its lack of diversity.

But when Brown attacked her claim, Democrats rallied their defense and Warren responded with a lot of feisty talk.

“If that’s all you’ve got, Scott Brown, I’m ready. And let me be clear. I am not backing down. I didn’t get in this race to fold up the first time I got punched,” Warren said of her GOP opponent’s non-stop efforts to keep this issue before voters.

Brown is a go-along-to-get-along Eastern Republican who kowtows to the GOP’s right wing. His voting record ought to offend most Massachusetts voters, who are liberal. But his right-wing ideological rigidity could prove to be less of an issue for a decisive bloc of voters in the Bay State than Warren’s identity crisis. Her assertion that family tales and the high cheekbones of some relatives led her to believe she had Native American blood coursing through her veins is laughable. That many Democrats, obsessed with unseating Brown, treat what she did as meaningless is lamentable. …

June 6, 2012

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Wasn’t Wisconsin Wonderful?

This June may be one of the most pivotal months in years. It started with the disastrous jobs report and subsequent market fall, and continued with the victory of free markets and free peoples in yesterday’s Wisconsin recall vote. As the month continues there is an election next week for the congressional seat vacated by Gabriel Giffords. We could also see the collapse of the EU. And later we will learn of the Supreme Court’s decisions on healthcare and Arizona’s immigration law. In the healthcare case, the Court might protect our freedoms using the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Almost 80 years ago the Court used the Commerce Clause in the case of the Schechter Brothers of Brooklyn. The Freeman tells the story of four Jewish brothers who stood in the way of the beginnings of FDR’s New Deal.

Roosevelt created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to enforce the NIRA’s provisions. It wrote or helped industries and labor write “codes” that governed production, prices, and labor relations. The AAA was a similar attempt to plan agricultural production. In the name of keeping prices up for farmers, millions of piglets were slaughtered and millions of acres of cotton were plowed under—while large numbers of Americans were hungry and cold.

Stores displayed the NRA “Blue Eagle” sign to show they were abiding by the codes, and consumers were encouraged to patronize only companies that did so. Thousands of inspectors checked for code compliance and initiated prosecutions against violators. Enter the Schechters.

The four brothers were born in Hungary before their parents made their way to the United States. With heavily accented, broken English, they were right out of central casting for the oft-stereotyped immigrant Jewish rube—and the Roosevelt administration treated them that way. The Yiddish version of their last name, Shochet, is also the word for their profession: butcher. More specifically, they were poultry middlemen, buying chickens from across the country, then butchering and selling them to the New York City market, mostly to retailers who then sold directly to consumers. Middlemen of course were exactly the sort of “problem” the NRA was designed to deal with, because in the eyes of the FDR crowd they profited off consumers while providing little in return. Additionally, prejudice against middlemen has been historically difficult to disentangle from anti-Semitism, since Jews have long performed this role and borne the brunt of ignorance about how trade creates value.

Most important to the story is that the Schechters ran a kosher butcher business. The Jewish laws of kashrut serve many purposes. Among them they specify how to safely kill and dispose of animals so as to avoid a variety of possible diseases. Also, they enforce a set of ethical obligations about how to treat animals that we kill and eat. The provisions about how to kill animals and what can and cannot be eaten helped the community avoid potentially unhealthy practices (and animals) and signaled that the animals sold had been inspected by recognized community authorities—namely rabbis trained to ensure that sellers followed the biblical rules. A certified kosher butcher has the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval from the most respected members of the local community.

Tuberculosis was the major issue with chickens, making it crucial to inspect the lungs to make sure they were smooth and therefore healthy. The word glatt in the phrase glatt kosher means “smooth,” which assures buyers no signs of tuberculosis were found. Importantly, customers at kosher butcheries could choose the birds they bought, which gave them the ability to enforce kashrut through their buying choices. So even if the birds were certified kosher by a rabbinical authority, customers could still exercise their own judgment about the quality of the chickens. Kosher butchers allowed this as a way to attract customers.

The problem for the Schechters was that Section 2, Article 7 of the NRA’s Code of Fair Competition for the Live Poultry Industry of the Metropolitan Area in and about the City of New York, which sounds like something out of Atlas Shrugged, mandated “straight killing,” which meant that customers could not select specific birds out of a coop. Instead they had to select a coop or half coop entirely. The code thus directly contradicted kashrut. This put the Schechters in an untenable position: Abide by the New Deal or abide by kashrut. Do the former and lose your customers. Do the latter and get arrested.

In June 1934 the Roosevelt administration expanded NRA inspections, and prosecutions began in earnest. The poultry industry was targeted because of alleged corruption. It is worth noting that corruption was not alleged to have caused the Great Depression, and the law said little about it. As is often the case, power assumed by the government for one purpose is very easy to use for other, more nefarious purposes.

Jennifer Rubin speculates on what follows a Walker win.

In all likelihood, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) will survive the recall tonight and become an unlikely rock star on the right. As Churchill said, “There is nothing more invigorating than to be shot at without result.”

The consequences of a Walker win may not be fully appreciated. So we’ll get the ball rolling:

1. Wisconsin becomes a key swing state, causing panic among those pundits who declared that Mitt Romney’s path to 270 electoral votes is “very narrow.”

2. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) zooms to the top of the VP list on the arguments that he’s so much less boring than the other front-runners, he can lock up Wisconsin, and the Ryan-Biden VP debate would be comedy gold, raising the question: After 30 minutes, should there be a mercy rule? …

Juan Williams writes on the meaning of the Wisconsin vote.

Ann Coulter on the right and Rachel Maddow on the left agree Wisconsin’s vote this Tuesday on recalling Gov. Scott Walker is going to have national implications.

They’ve got that right.

If Walker wins, it will encourage Republican governors around the nation to enact more laws that diminish the power of public worker unions. Those efforts usually involve stripping unions of collective bargaining rights in an effort to shut off the money flowing from unions to Democrats.

Since the 2010 midterm elections, GOP governors have been intent on closing off the flow of cash from taxpayers to public sector unions which then support Democratic candidates.

In trying to choke the life out of unions, those governors have had varied degrees of success.

But if Walker wins, governors like Michigan’s Rick Snyder, Ohio’s John Kasich and Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett will find new pockets of money and political support for their anti-union fight.

By the same logic, if the unions cannot defeat an unpopular GOP governor whose policies have threatened their power – and their very existence in one of the most pro-union states in the country – Republicans and Democrats alike will perceive them as weak.

The state’s labor unions – including the AFL-CIO, AFSCME and the SEIU – could not get their favorite candidate, Kathleen Falk, nominated as the candidate to run against Walker. …

Allysia Finley tells us why Rahm Emanuel may be rooting for a Walker Wisconsin win.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel helped raise money for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a fellow Democrat who is trying to unseat Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in today’s recall election. But part of Mr. Emanuel may be developing an appreciation for some of the Republican governor’s reforms. The Chicago school district and teachers union can’t agree on a new contract. The biggest roadblock? Collective bargaining, the same issue that sparked the Wisconsin recall effort.

The union is demanding a 30% raise over the next two years and class sizes capped at 23 students. Mr. Emanuel wants to give teachers a 2% raise next year and establish a merit pay pilot program. …

You may remember the Dem polling outfit PPP said Sunday Walker had only a 3% lead. Nice job PPP! Does that stand for Pretty Putrid Polling? Ed Morrissey has the story.

What to think of the latest PPP poll in Wisconsin? On one hand, a narrow lead within the margin of error on the day before an election might signal a slight and final shift in momentum in Tom Barrett’s favor. On the other, PPP is a Democratic pollster who might be looking for the best possible take on the race — and having the Democrat down three as a best case would be a positive for supporters of Scott Walker. The Hill reports on the results:

A new poll finds Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker with a narrowed lead over Democratic challenger Tom Barrett ahead of Tuesday’s recall vote.

A Public Policy Polling survey released Monday shows Walker with the support of 50 percent of likely voters, ahead of Milwaukee Mayor Barrett at 47 percent.

The Economist has pointed words about Obama’s class war rhetoric.

… Mr Obama has even managed to choke out a few kind words about private equity, which, he says, is “a healthy part of the free market”, manned, in many cases, by “folks who do good work”. He claims he has no problem with the industry itself, but simply does not consider it a good proving ground for future presidents (unlike, say, community organising). Mr Romney’s contention that his experience in business will help him get the jobless back to work is flawed, Mr Obama’s argument runs, since private equity exists “to maximise profits, and that’s not always going to be good for communities or businesses or workers”.

The disclaimers are more than a little disingenuous, since Mr Obama often does seem to suggest that financiers are greedy wreckers from whom America’s economy must be saved. But that aside, and in spite of the Republicans’ bluster, his rhetoric is hardly illegitimate or extreme. America’s middle class is struggling. Median incomes are stagnant, while the rich have been getting richer. It is easy to argue that the average Joe is not getting a fair shake—or at least not the same shake he used to. The question is whether voters care most about that, or whether they simply want to see the economy humming again, equitably or not.

In that case, the election will revolve not around fairness, but competence. Mr Romney is fond of saying that Mr Obama has no idea how the economy works and how jobs are created. The way the Obama campaign talks about Bain Capital suggests that his criticism is correct. Mr Obama, as noted above, likes to insinuate that there is a conflict between pursuing profits and creating jobs. In the long run, however, in a competitive economy, that is nonsense. Only profitable firms can sustain any jobs, and the more profitable they are, the more money they have to invest in new ventures with new workers. Mr Obama is guilty not of rhetorical excess but of economic muddle. That is far more worrying.

June 5, 2012

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Great summary of the Wisconsin issues and lessons from John Fund.

It looks as if Governor Scott Walker will survive Tuesday’s recall vote. The Real Clear Politics average of recent polls has him leading Milwaukee’s Democratic mayor Tom Barrett by 6.6 points. As of late Sunday, the betting site Intrade was predicting that Walker has a 94.5 percent chance of becoming the victor. Even Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is now saying the recall wasn’t smart. “Don’t get an election that’s divisive, that may have an influence on the presidential election,” he told MSNBC last week. “We made a mistake doing that.”

If the recall fails, what will be the takeaways from the 17 months of pitched war that Wisconsin has endured since Governor Walker proposed his dramatic reforms of pensions and privileges in the state’s public-sector unions?

Expect the Left to Blame Obama
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times dismissed Obama on Sunday as someone who “prefers to float above, at a reserve, in grandiose mists.” When the likes of Dowd are no longer feeling the love, we shouldn’t be surprised that other Democrats are dumping on Obama for not showing up to help Barrett in Wisconsin. “Progressive Pundits Lay Groundwork to Blame Obama if Wisconsin Recall Fails” was the headline of a searing critique by Noah Rothman at Mediaite. He quoted Ed Schultz of MSNBC sarcastically noting that the president was in neighboring Iowa and Minnesota last week and that his campaign office is in nearby Chicago. “It’s all around, but is it in?” Schultz asked of the Obama campaign. “[Union members] want him on that line because he talked about being on that line with them back in 2007.” Schultz closed his plea for an Obama visit by saying it is the “job of a leader” to motivate his followers.

Liberals view Wisconsin as a state that is “leading the way in reshaping American’s view of the role of government,” Rothman emphasizes. “President Obama has abandoned that fight, noting correctly that it is not likely to be won,” he says. “But progressive pundits . . . are right — this is not just another election. . . . It is a fight with broad implications that President Obama has abandoned. The question now becomes, can they [progressives] forgive this betrayal ahead of a tough election in the fall?”

Wisconsin Is Now in Play for November
The state hasn’t voted Republican since Ronald Reagan’s reelection effort in 1984, and Obama won it easily by 14 points in 2008. But the state can be competitive. Both Al Gore and John Kerry carried it by only a handful of votes — many of which may have been fraudulent, as a 2007 Milwaukee Police Department report showed. …

Buzz Feed attempts to quantify Wisconsin’s results.

… The key to this election, however, is not really whether Governor Walker wins. More or less everyone expects him to do that. The key is how much he wins by. The crude calculation is this: Walker defeat equals certain Obama win in November. Walker win by 1-5 percentage points equals very close presidential general election (nationally). A Walker win by 6 points or more equals Mitt Romney is the favorite to win in November.

The entire political world will be running the numbers Tuesday night. Truly important elections don’t come along that often. This one matters.

Jennifer Rubin dreams up excuses for the recall proponents.

It seems that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is heading for a win in the recall election. It is essential for the left to come up with excuses to avoid the obvious conclusions one would draw from a Walker victory, namely that this recall business was a monumentally dumb idea and that public-employee unions aren’t nearly as popular as Democrats believe.

I will save the excuse-mongers some time. Here is a handy list of rationalizations:

1. Walker didn’t win by as much as some thought he would, so the election is a big win for recall advocates.

2. The recall proponents were outspent.

3. Did we mention the recall proponents were outspent? …

Ms Rubin posts on the reality that is closing in on America’s left.

What does it say when:

The left dubs Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s collective bargaining reforms to be an abomination and mounts a recall effort .?.?. and union membership drops like a stone while a large majority of voters thinks that those reforms are working just fine?

The left insists for three years that massive borrowing, Obamacare, the constant threat of tax hikes, reams of new regulations and refusal to address the drivers of our debt won’t hobble the economy and . . . we are at 8.2 percent unemployment and less than 2 percent growth?

The left concocts a “war on women” and . . . women voters flock to Romney?

The left in revulsion over the Bush “freedom agenda” calls for cordial engagement of North Korea, Russia, Iran and Syria and . . . the Green Revolution is dormant, Iran and North Korea speed ahead with their nuclear weapons programs, Bashar al-Assad is in power and 13,000 Syrians are dead?

The left is convinced that the Constitution allows Congress to do any purportedly virtuous thing that pops into its collective mind .?.?. and the Supreme Court is poised to invalidate all or some of the left’s crowning legislative achievement?

Hmm. It might just be that many assumptions held by liberal politicians and parroted by the left punditocracy are substantively unsound and at odds with the convictions of large majorities of Americans. …

Michael Barone thinks the country looks like Texas, not CA.

… California is likely to grow more slowly than the nation, for the first time in history, and could even start losing population.

Fortunately, governors of some other high-tax states are itching to cut taxes. The shale oil and natural gas boom have job seekers streaming to hitherto unlikely spots like North Dakota and northeast Ohio. Great Plains cities like Omaha, Neb., and Des Moines, Iowa, are looking pretty healthy too.

It’s not clear whether Atlanta and its smaller kin — Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C., Nashville, Tenn, Jacksonville, Fla. — will resume their robust growth. They’ve suffered high unemployment lately.

But Texas has been doing very well. If you draw a triangle whose points are Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, enclosing Austin, you’ve just drawn a map of the economic and jobs engine of North America.

Texas prospers not just because of oil and gas, but thanks to a diversified and sophisticated economy. It has attracted large numbers of both immigrants and domestic migrants for a quarter-century. One in 12 Americans lives there.

America is getting to look a lot more like Texas, and that’s one trend that I hope continues.

Turns out Elizabeth Warren was making a small fortune trading foreclosed and distressed properties in Oklahoma. Howie Carr has the details.

If there’s anything Granny Warren hates more than a fake Indian or a plagiarist, it’s one of these damn real-estate speculators buying up the hammered middle class’ homes and flipping them for big bucks.

Unless, of course, Granny is the hypocrite conniving with the banks to do the hammering and the hacking.

Granny wrote in 2000 that foreclosure sales “are notorious for fetching low prices.” And boy, would she know.

Here’s a foreclosed property she picked up in Oklahoma City at 2123 NW 14th St. for $4,000 in 1993. She transferred it to her brother and his wife in March 2004 and they sold it for $30,000 in February 2006.

Those kinds of returns make you a 1 percenter like Granny. That, and cashing in on a racial spoils system you have no business taking advantage of.

The prior owners of the $4,000 house were Richard and Shelley Walter, who had a son who served as a Marine in Iraq. I wonder if they’ve read Granny’s impassioned attacks on foreclosures: “Foreclosure rates are skyrocketing. Is it a civil right to lose that home in a sheriff’s auction?” ..

The Boston Herald says now Indians are angry at Lie-awatha.

Native Americans — outraged by Elizabeth Warren’s admission yesterday that she told her Ivy League bosses about her purported tribal roots — accused the embattled Democrat of snubbing them and vowed to protest at tomorrow’s state convention even as she scrambled to placate supporters.

“If she really wanted to reach out to our native people and have a discussion about issues that are affecting us, then she needs to talk to our tribal media,” said Rhonda Levando Gayton, president of the Native American Journalists Association.

Rob Capriccioso, a reporter with Indian Country Today, said he has reached out to Warren’s campaign several times for an interview since May 15 and has been blown off. Capriccioso said there is a growing skepticism in Native American circles about Warren. …

Corner post on cool bumper stickers.

Other readers have kept the hits coming. One says, “Last week, while driving around Houston, I saw an F-350 with a sticker that said, ‘I’m not racist — I don’t like Biden either.’”

Another reader says, “Here in Wisconsin, we see the following on bumper stickers and yard signs: ‘Recall Santa: I didn’t get what I wanted.’”

June 4, 2012

Jun4

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Chris Cillizza could have picked the president for having the Worst Week in Washington, but instead he picked Elizabeth Warren for the second time in a month. So Maureen Dowd did her own version of WWW and she picked the kid prez.

ON Friday night, the nation’s capital was under a tornado watch. And that was the best thing that happened to the White House all week.

As the president was being slapped by Mitt Romney for being too weak on national security, he was being rapped by a Times editorial for being too aggressive on national security.

A Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane revealed that the liberal law professor who campaigned against torture and the Iraq war now personally makes the final decisions on the “kill list,” targets for drone strikes. “A unilateral campaign of death is untenable,” the editorial asserted.

On Thursday, Bill Clinton once more telegraphed that he considers Obama a lightweight who should not have bested his wife. Bluntly contradicting the Obama campaign theme that Romney is a heartless corporate raider, Clinton told CNN that the Republican’s record at Bain was “sterling.”

Covering a humorous W. at the unveiling of his portrait, the White House press actually seemed nostalgic for the president who bollixed up Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina and the economy — a sure sign that the Obama magic is flagging.

On Friday, an ugly job market report led to the stock market’s worst day of the year. As the recovery flat-lined, the president conceded to a crowd at a Honeywell factory in Golden Valley, Minn., that “our economy is still facing some serious headwinds” and getting sucked further into Europe’s sinkhole. In depressing imagery for the start of the summer campaign, cable channels carried the red Dow arrow pointing down while Obama spoke; the Dow wiped out all of its 2012 gains.

The president who started off with such dazzle now seems incapable of stimulating either the economy or the voters. His campaign is offering Obama 2012 car magnets for a donation of $10; cat collars reading “I Meow for Michelle” for $12; an Obama grill spatula for $40, and discounted hoodies and T-shirts. How the mighty have fallen. …

Charles Krauthammer on Obama the “drone warrior.”

… So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills, has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.

A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge, jury and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.

This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle, they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear civilian clothes, hide among civilians and target civilians indiscriminately. But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.

Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead terrorists can’t talk.

Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.

One capture could potentially make us safer than 10 killings. …

According to Matthew Continetti, picking drone targets has prevented the president from answering Assad’s atrocities in Syria.

Elie Wiesel had a question for Barack Obama. The author, a survivor of Auschwitz, was accompanying the president on a tour of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on April 23. As they passed through an exhibit detailing the U.S. government’s denial of refuge to Jews fleeing the Nazi empire, Wiesel asked Obama, “What would you do?” Afterward, in public remarks, Obama did not mention his answer. But he did say, when confronted by atrocities, “You don’t just count on officials, you don’t just count on governments. You count on people—and mobilizing their consciences.”

After the barbaric events of last week in the Syrian village of Houla, where government troops massacred more than a hundred women and children, Obama’s words sound hollow. And the initiative he announced that day seems like a slap in the face.

Obama used his visit to the Holocaust Museum to remind the world that on August 4, 2011, he issued a “Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities” that ordered the creation of “an interagency Atrocities Prevention Board” to “coordinate a whole of government approach to preventing mass atrocities and genocide.” The first task of this board would be a thorough “interagency review” to “develop and recommend the membership, mandate, structure, operational protocols, authorities, and support necessary for the Atrocities Prevention Board to coordinate and develop atrocity prevention and response policy.” The National Security Council’s staff director for War Crimes and Atrocities, a human rights attorney who once served as George Clooney’s “full time human-rights adviser,” would supervise the review.

Forget health care rationing. This toothless parody of bureaucracy is the real “death panel”—a collection of titleholders that stands by in the face of mass murder. Its job is to “help the U.S government identify and address atrocity threats,” in the midst of one of the worst “atrocity threats” in recent memory. When asked Wednesday if the Atrocities Prevention Board has even met to discuss Syria, White House press secretary Jay Carney could only say, “I don’t know the answer to that.” Maybe the board is still busy conducting its interagency review.

This isn’t a joke. It is an insult to Assad’s victims. …

WSJ Editors write on Eric Holder’s latest outrage.

The United States of America has a black President whose chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, is also black. They have a lot of political power. So how are they using it? Well, one way is to assert to black audiences that voter ID laws are really attempts to disenfranchise black Americans. And liberals think Donald Trump’s birther fantasies are offensive?

“In my travels across this country, I’ve heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from citizens, who—often for the first time in their lives—now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation’s most noble ideals,” Mr. Holder said Wednesday in a speech to the Council of Black Churches. Voter ID laws and white discrimination, he added, mean that “some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang in the balance.”

That’s right. The two most powerful men in America are black, two of the last three Secretaries of State were black, numerous corporate CEOs and other executives are black, and minorities of many races now win state-wide elections in states that belonged to the Confederacy, but the AG implies that Jim Crow is on the cusp of a comeback.

It’s demeaning to have to dignify this argument with facts, but here goes. …

Similar thoughts from Thomas Sowell.

Attorney General Eric Holder recently told a group of black clergymen that the right to vote was being threatened by people who are seeking to block access to the ballot box by blacks and other minorities.

This is truly world-class chutzpah, by an Attorney General who stopped attorneys in his own Department of Justice from completing the prosecution of black thugs who stationed themselves outside a Philadelphia voting site to harass and intimidate white voters.

This may have seemed like a small episode to some at the time, but it was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The U.S. Attorney who was prosecuting that case — J. Christian Adams — resigned from the Department of Justice in protest, and wrote a book about a whole array of similar race-based decisions on voting rights by Eric Holder and his subordinates at the Department of Justice.

The book is titled “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” It names names, dates and places around the country where the Department of Justice stopped its own attorneys from pursuing cases of voter fraud and intimidation, when it was blacks who were accused of these crimes.

If Mr. Adams is lying, he has taken a huge risk in citing individuals by name and quoting them directly. Yet, despite the fact that most of those he accuses are lawyers, apparently no one has sued him. Moreover, Adams has also testified under oath before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, on the racial double standard at the Department of Justice, when it comes to voting rights. …

More kudos for the Romney campaign. This time from a Michael Walsh Corner post.

More impressive action from the rebels of the Mitt Romney camp as they opened up a three-front skirmish against forces loyal to the Emperor Hussein yesterday in Boston, Fremont, Calif., and Washington, D.C.

There was the candidate himself, giving a sharp speech about the crony-capitalistic disaster of Solyndra outside the shuttered headquarters of the green pipe dream itself. At the same time, President Obama was pinned down in the capital, grinding his teeth through some typically solipsistic remarks while his detested predecessor grabbed the spotlight at the unveiling of his official presidential portrait — and wowed the crowd with some folksy self-deprecation and love for his family.

But the most important engagement of the day was the public heckling of presidential consigliere David Axelrod, including orchestrated chants of “Solyndra, Solyndra.” Never elected to anything, the former Chicago Tribune reporter and city-hall bureau-chief-turned-campaign-consultant made an unforced error in emerging from the shadows, where the general public could get a good look at him. …

Ed Morrissey reports on the diminished fortunes of Wisconsin’s unions.

Popquiz, hotshots*: You have public-employee unions that force public-sector employees to pay dues and make the state act as their bagman. The state refuses to collect dues and changes the law to make dues and union membership entirely voluntary. What do people do?

That’s easy … they quit paying the dues:

David Harsanyi on Bloomberg’s Big Soda Ban.

This week, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced that he will outlaw the sale of sodas, sports drinks and other sugary beverages that exceed 16 ounces. Don’t worry. There are numerous exemptions to this petty interference. Feel free to indulge in high-caloric milkshakes, fruit juices or just head to the convenience store and grab a Big Gulp, a Slurpee, or buy large bottles of Diet Coke.

When you act like a petty tyrant, making arbitrary decisions with absolutely no basis in science or common sense is your prerogative. In the Bloomberg’s vernacular this is referred to as “leadership.” “I think that’s what the public wants the mayor to do,” he explained. The public’s loathing for large-sized soda is so high, evidently, that they need a billionaire technocrat to force them to stop buying more of it.

This is nothing new in New York. Bloomberg, who embodies C.S. Lewis’ observation that “those who torment us for our own good torment us without end,” has banned smoking in bars and restaurants, public parks and on private terraces. He has gone after salt and he has banned trans fats in restaurants. …

The cartoonists have fun with NY’s soda ban.

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Monthly Archives: June 2012

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