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WSJ’s Weekend Interview carried a warning.

Yale Prof. Charles Hill is often called a “conservative.” But he is one of the foremost students and advocates of what he calls the “liberal” (“in the finest sense of the word”) world order. And he is worried that Americans increasingly don’t understand how special the modern era has been or their own crucial role in developing and securing it.

To some, the Obama’s administration’s desire to “lead from behind” and seek United Nations approval for actions abroad represents an appropriate retreat to a more humble American posture. Mr. Hill, by contrast, sees the possible end of a great era of human rights and democracy promotion the likes of which the planet has never seen.

Our world has “been increasingly tolerant and increasingly trying to eradicate racism and increasingly trying to expand freedom. And it can come to an end,” he says.

What might replace it? “Spheres of influence.” Or to use a more archaic term, “empire.”

Mr. Hill is the all-too-rare professor with an extensive background outside of academia. He made his career in the U.S. foreign service working on China and the Middle East, among other issues. He has advised secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and served as a policy consultant to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali. His ability to combine real-world experience with appreciation of the intellectual currents animating history—Dickens comes up during our discussion of the anti-slavery movement in 19th-century Britain—has made his courses some of the most popular at Yale. …

… What amazes Mr. Hill is how much of a break the Obama foreign policy represents compared with the bipartisan consensus stretching back to Truman. That culminated in President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, which he likens to an “emancipation proclamation for the world.” But, he says, “The democracy wave that began 20 years ago [at the end of the Cold War] is now turning backward.” Why? “The conduct of the Obama administration.”

So the future is still very much a choice, not an inevitability, I ask.

“Absolutely. It’s been a choice,” he says. “I’m not so sure now that people even see the choice because the mentalities are shifting. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on 1.5% ‘growth.’

He can blame George Bush. He can whine that he was handed a terrible economy. (Ronald Reagan inherited worse.) But there’s no spin that will make 1.5 percent growth in GDP anything but dismal. It is not a recovery we are in; this is what we need to recover from — anemic growth, endemically high unemployment and record poverty.

What is the president’s big idea? Raise taxes on small business. What is he campaigning on? Mitt Romney’s tax returns. What’s his major rhetorical thrust? Businessmen shouldn’t claim credit for their success.

You know why the media sycophants want to talk about David Cameron (the man who apologized to North Korea for a mix-up with flags and gave Obama smooches in 2008). You understand David Axelrod wants to flog a blind quote in a British newspaper. You can see why Obama isn’t asked hard questions.

The latest news only points up how irrelevant, if not absurd, is most of the media coverage of the presidential campaign. …

Kim Strassel writes on “four little words.” 

What’s the difference between a calm and cool Barack Obama, and a rattled and worried Barack Obama? Four words, it turns out.

“You didn’t build that” is swelling to such heights that it has the president somewhere unprecedented: on defense. Mr. Obama has felt compelled—for the first time in this campaign—to cut an ad in which he directly responds to the criticisms of his now-infamous speech, complaining his opponents took his words “out of context.”

That ad follows two separate ones from his campaign attempting damage control. His campaign appearances are now about backpedaling and proclaiming his love for small business. And the Democratic National Committee produced its own panicked memo, which vowed to “turn the page” on Mr. Romney’s “out of context . . . BS”—thereby acknowledging that Chicago has lost control of the message.

The Obama campaign has elevated poll-testing and focus-grouping to near-clinical heights, and the results drive the president’s every action: his policies, his campaign venues, his targeted demographics, his messaging. That Mr. Obama felt required—teeth-gritted—to address the “you didn’t build that” meme means his vaunted focus groups are sounding alarms.

The obsession with tested messages is precisely why the president’s rare moments of candor—on free enterprise, on those who “cling to their guns and religion,” on the need to “spread the wealth around”—are so revealing. They are a look at the real man. It turns out Mr. Obama’s dismissive words toward free enterprise closely mirror a speech that liberal Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren gave last August.

Ms. Warren’s argument—that government is the real source of all business success—went viral and made a profound impression among the liberal elite, who have been pushing for its wider adoption. Mr. Obama chose to road-test it on the national stage, presumably thinking it would underline his argument for why the wealthy should pay more. It was a big political misstep, and now has the Obama team seriously worried. …

Charles Krauthammer replies to administration flacks.

Shortly after 9/11, President George W. Bush received from Prime Minister Tony Blair a bust of Winston Churchill as an expression of British-American solidarity. Bush gave it pride of place in the Oval Office.

In my Friday column about Mitt Romney’s trip abroad and U.S. foreign policy [“Why he’s going where he’s going,” op-ed], I wrote that Barack Obama “started his Presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office.”

Within hours, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer had created something of a bonfire. Citing my statement, he posted a furious blog on the White House Web site, saying, “normally, we wouldn’t address a rumor that’s so patently false, but just this morning the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer repeated this ridiculous claim in his column . . . This is 100% false. The bust [is] still in the White House. In the Residence. Outside the Treaty Room.”

Except that it isn’t. As the British Embassy said in a statement issued just a few hours later, “the bust now resides in the British ambassador’s residence in Washington D.C.”

As the British Embassy explained in 2009, the bust “was lent for the first term of office of President Bush. When the President was elected for his second and final term, the loan was extended until January 2009. The new President has decided not to continue this loan and the bust has now been returned.”

QED.

At which point, one would expect Pfeiffer to say: Sorry, I made a mistake. End of story.

But Pfeiffer had an additional problem. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: President Obama says he’ll visit Israel in his second term. Israel’s response, “We’ll put you down as a ‘Maybe.’”

Leno: President Obama’s college apartment in New York City is up for rent at $2,400 a month. Coincidentally, he was only there for one four-year lease.

Leno: Joe Biden says he had to ask his wife Jill to marry him five times. Five times! That’s not a proposal. That’s harassment!

Fallon: President Obama says thanks to him, people in the rest of the world have a new attitude toward America. It’s true — people used to hate us, but thanks to him, now they just feel sorry for us.

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Mark Steyn comments on the jihad against Chick-fil-A in Chicago and Boston.

… The city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, agrees with the Alderman: Chick-fil-A does not represent “Chicago values” – which is true if by “Chicago values” you mean machine politics, AIDS-conspiracy-peddling pastors and industrial-scale black youth homicide rates. But, before he was mayor, Rahm Emanuel was President Obama’s chief of staff. Until the president’s recent “evolution,” the Obama administration held the same position on gay marriage as Chick-fil-A. Would Alderman Moreno have denied Barack Obama the right to open a chicken restaurant in the First Ward? Did Rahm Emanuel quit the Obama administration on principle? Don’t be ridiculous. Mayor Emanuel is a former ballet dancer, and when it’s politically necessary he can twirl on a dime.

Meanwhile, fellow mayor Tom Menino announced that Chick-fil-A would not be opening in his burg anytime soon. “If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult,” said His Honor. If you’ve just wandered in in the middle of the column, this guy Menino isn’t the mayor of Soviet Novosibirsk or Kampong Cham under the Khmer Rouge, but of Boston, Mass. Nevertheless, he shares the commissars’ view that in order to operate even a modest and politically inconsequential business it is necessary to demonstrate that one is in full ideological compliance with party orthodoxy. “There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail,” Mayor Menino thundered in his letter to Mr. Cathy, “and no place for your company alongside it.” No, sir. On Boston’s Freedom Trail, you’re free to march in ideological lockstep with the city authorities – or else. Hard as it is to believe, there was a time when Massachusetts was a beacon of liberty: the shot heard round the world, and all that. Now it fires Bureau of Compliance permit-rejection letters round the world.

Mayor Menino subsequently backed down and claimed the severed rooster’s head left in Mr. Cathy’s bed was all just a misunderstanding. Yet, when it comes to fighting homophobia on Boston’s Freedom Trail, His Honor is highly selective. As the Boston Herald’s Michael Graham pointed out, Menino is happy to hand out municipal licenses to groups whose most prominent figures call for gays to be put to death. The mayor couldn’t have been more accommodating (including giving them $1.8 million of municipal land) of the new mosque of the Islamic Society of Boston, whose IRS returns listed as one of their seven trustees Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Like President Obama, Imam Qaradawi’s position on gays is in a state of “evolution”: He can’t decide whether to burn them or toss ‘em off a cliff. “Some say we should throw them from a high place,” he told Al-Jazeera. “Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement … . The important thing is to treat this act as a crime.” Unlike the deplorable Mr. Cathy, Imam Qaradawi is admirably open-minded: There are so many ways to kill homosexuals, why restrict yourself to just one? In Mayor Menino’s Boston, if you take the same view of marriage as President Obama did from 2009 to 2012, he’ll run your homophobic ass out of town. But, if you want to toss those godless sodomites off the John Hancock Tower, he’ll officiate at your ribbon-cutting ceremony. …

 The Trib’s John Kass concentrates on Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

… “Chick-fil-A’s values are not Chicago values,” Emanuel said in a statement. “They’re not respectful of our residents, our neighbors and our family members, and if you’re going to be part of the Chicago community, you should reflect the Chicago values.”

Remember that Emanuel flew into a rage when businessman Joe Ricketts, whose children own the Chicago Cubs, dared to even think about supporting an anti-Obama public relations push. When challenged, the Cubs owners fell to their knees.

But there’s one guy whose values Chicago’s first Jewish mayor wouldn’t dare challenge:

Noted anti-Semite and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Farrakhan loudly condemns gay marriage, but Emanuel needs him. The mayor has lost control of the streets, his police force is vastly undermanned and the street gang wars of Chicago have claimed more American lives than Afghanistan.

Emanuel is desperate. He wants Farrakhan’s army with the bow ties out on the South and West sides to settle things down.

And Emanuel knows this:

Louis Farrakhan isn’t a chicken sandwich.

Boston’s Howie Carr goes after his Mayor Menino who Carr calls “Mumbles.”

… Usually, Mumbles takes his cues in PC idiocy from Mayor Bloomberg. This time, he was driving the lead clown car. And you know the old saying: Monkey see, monkey do.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago instantly jumped on the bandwagon. He took time out from cozying up to well-known gay-marriage supporter Louis Farrakhan to denounce Dan Cathy. Amazing how similar Chicago and Boston have become — both cities celebrate diversity by hating Chick-fil-A and looking the other way at Muslim homophobia.

Oh yeah, and one other thing Boston and Chicago have in common.

Rotten baseball teams. …

Michael Barone says this year’s election is different from 2004.

Does the 2012 campaign look a lot like the 2004 campaign? Many Democrats think so.

And there are some resemblances. As in 2004, current polling suggests a close race and shows only about a dozen states in contention.

As in 2004, the incumbent has been running negative ads against the challenger, hoping to disqualify him as Bill Clinton disqualified Bob Dole in 1996. Many Democrats think that Barack Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s business career will have the same effect they think the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads had on John Kerry in 2004.

But, as William Galston of the Brookings Institution, an alumnus of the Clinton White House, writes in the New Republic, “the evidence in favor of all these propositions is remarkably thin.”

Galston points out that in 2004 no single issue was as prominent as the economy is this year and that on most significant issues George W. Bush had a clear edge by the end of the campaign. He cites polling evidence that the Swift Boat ads hurt Kerry less than did Bush ads replaying his March statement that “I did actually vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

Also, he points out that many more voters this year think the nation is seriously off on the wrong track and that the economy is in trouble. Obama’s job rating now is weaker than Bush’s was then.

Galston, as usual, is on target. His analysis tracks with the statement of Democratic pollster Peter Hart (for whom I worked from 1974 to 1981) that Obama’s chances are “no better than 50 percent.”

But there are at least two other salient differences between 2004 and 2012.

One is that the 2004 election occurred during a period of unusual stability in American voting behavior. …

More on the student load debacle. This time from the Detroit Free Press.

Janelle O’Hara knows her college debt isn’t anything close to the financial migraine hitting other college grads.

The 24-year-old pays $150 a month for her $17,000 in federal student loans — not much next to the $300 or $400 a month that some of her friends pay.

One of her friends who didn’t graduate had to choose between rent one month and the student loan payment. Rent won — the young woman needed somewhere to live.

“It’s there, and it’s nagging at you while you’re in school. But it’s nothing like when you get that first notice saying, ‘Oh, by the way, you’re going to have to start paying,’ ” said O’Hara, who works full-time as a social media specialist at Michigan First Credit Union in Lathrup Village.

The big number that everyone is talking about is the $1 trillion in student loan debt. But smaller numbers — $150 a month, $350 a month, $500 a month — are eating into individual budgets, too. And that debt leaves younger consumers on edge, wondering whether they’ll be able to buy a new car or get a home one day.

Student loan debt has the potential to be far more burdensome than credit card debt.

Some policy experts, lenders and leaders in financial services are growing more concerned, too, particularly if college grads have trouble finding well-paying professional jobs.

“Debt of this magnitude has the potential to slow down the economy significantly, which affects everyone,”

WaPo’s Reliable Source posts on Michelle’s $6,800 jacket.

Michelle Obama has been criticized for not dressing up enough for Queen Elizabeth II, so she stepped up her game Friday night at an Olympics reception for heads of state at Buckingham Palace. The first lady wore a very fancy J. Mendel capsleeve jacket — “white viscose techno crepe tailored jacket with overlapped side panels and silver embroidery” from the 2013 Resort collection, according to a press release from the company. It’s not in stores yet, but high-end retailer Moda Operandi listed the jacket at a princely $6,800. The White House declined to comment.

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In the 12 quarters of the Reagan recovery the economy grew 18.5%. Obama’s anemic total is 6.7%. James Pethokoukis has the story.

The U.S. economy is not doing fine.

Earlier this year, the Obama White House predicted the economy would grow 3% in 2012. Today’s GDP report shows that ain’t going to happen. The Commerce Department said the economy grew at an anemic 1.5% annual rate from April through June, after a revised 2.0% in the first quarter. It now seems likely the economy will be lucky to grow at 2% for the entire year. And that’s after growing just 1.8% last year.

Indeed, research from the Federal Reserve finds that since 1947, when year-over-year real GDP growth falls below 2%, recession follows within a year 70% of the time. The U.S. economy remains in the Recession Red Zone. …

Charles Krauthammer says the Romney itinerary has followed Barack’s failures.

A generation ago, it was the three I’s. A presidential challenger’s obligatory foreign trip meant Ireland, Italy and Israel. Mitt Romney’s itinerary is slightly different: Britain, Poland and Israel.

Not quite the naked ethnic appeal of yore. Each destination suggests a somewhat more subtle affinity: Britain, playing to our cultural connectedness with the Downton Abbey folks who’ve been at our side in practically every fight for the last hundred years; Poland, representing the “new Europe,” the Central Europeans so unashamedly pro-American; Israel, appealing to most American Jews but also to an infinitely greater number of passionately sympathetic evangelical Christians.

Unlike Barack Obama, Romney abroad will not be admonishing his country, criticizing his president or declaring himself a citizen of the world. Indeed, Romney should say nothing of substance, just offer effusive expressions of affection for his hosts — and avoid needless contretemps, like his inexplicably dumb and gratuitous critique of Britain’s handling of the Olympic Games. The whole point is to show appreciation for close allies, something the current president has conspicuously failed to do.

On the contrary. Obama started his presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office. Then came the State Department official who denied the very existence of a U.S.-British special relationship, saying: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world.” …

National Journal says Romney scores perfect 10 in the gaffe Olympics.

Mitt Romney spent Thursday trying to recover from a comment earlier this week that suggested that London was not ready for its Olympics. But it wasn’t proving to be an easy fix.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee said he had faith in the host city’s Games work as he emerged from a meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron and other officials. Speaking from his experience running the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, Romney said a few things will always go wrong. …

Sean Trende thinks the Romney campaign needs to develop a more positive message.

… In this situation, the Republicans are doing the exact wrong thing by making 90 percent of their ads attacks on Obama. Although voters always say this but rarely mean it, they really do want Romney to go positive. They are interested in learning about his accomplishments (or lack thereof), especially during his term as governor.

While the Obama camp has been trying to give voters what they want, albeit from a negative perspective (and perhaps part of why Obama hasn’t moved the polls with his blitz is that those voters who are interested in Bain and Romney’s taxes are waiting to hear Romney’s side of the story), the Romney camp and his super PAC supporters have been banging their collective heads against a wall essentially trying to re-convince voters that the president is not doing a good job. Simply put, this won’t do it.

It is a real question whether the Romney campaign gets this. Throughout the primary process, it focused relentlessly on tearing down its opponents. Thus far, it has done the same in the general election. Maybe Romney doesn’t have that much of a record of accomplishment as governor, outside of the radioactive health care law. Or maybe the campaign simply isn’t capable of telling a compelling, positive story about the nominee.

Regardless, these are parts of his biography that simply must be filled in if Romney wants to win, along with his activities turning around the Salt Lake City Olympics. (Does anyone outside of the political world even know about that?) If Romney can do this, he’ll have an excellent shot at winning this race. It might not even be close. But if he can’t, he will probably become the first presidential challenger in modern history to pass Step 1 of the referendum model, but fail Step 2.

Andrew Malcolm wonders if Obama is weaker than what shows in the polls.

… conventional wisdom holds, the real political battle these next 102 days is for a slim middle of self-defined, so-called independents, presumably susceptible to argument and evidence. A fair number of these folks are really faux independents who prefer the perceived openness of that label, although in truth their voting patterns are likely as predictable as their parents. 

But is this perhaps a false deadlock? There’s a growing suspicion among conservatives — and a latent fear among Obamaphiles — that another significant bloc of voters is hidden like double agents within the Democrat’s camp.

These are voters who still say they support Obama with apparent conviction, much like those Wisconsin voters last month who so badly skewed the recall’s exit poll results by saying, you betcha, they voted the union way against Gov. Scott Walker. But, in truth and in secret, they did not.

Like the Democratic primary voters in Kentucky, Arkansas and West Virginia who, when given a chance this spring, voted more than 40% for A.B.O. (Anyone But Obama).

The remaining loyal Obama supporters are so invested in their guy they’re reluctant to turn on him publicly, to admit they were wrong or naively misled by a Chicago machine pol. But they are genuinely, if clandestinely, disappointed in his lack of performance and leadership, his stunningly harsh rhetoric for a professed uniter, and are susceptible to changing their secret vote. Or maybe simply staying home on Nov. 6. …

Jennifer Rubin says the Dems political problem is the president.

The party line from Democrats this year has been to deny that President Obama is in any trouble of losing Jewish support to Mitt Romney in November. But the announcement that a group of Jewish liberals are seeking to form a group to counter the Republican Jewish Coalition’s campaign against Obama is proof the president is in trouble.

But these Jewish liberal donors who wish to offset the efforts of Romney donors such as Sheldon Adelson are making a mistake if they think all that is needed is to throw some money at the Jewish market. If the RJC’s “buyer’s remorse” ad campaign has traction it is because Jewish voters know that President Obama is, as veteran diplomat Aaron David Miller wrote yesterday, “not in love with the idea of Israel.” This is not, as one Democrat told Politico, a case of Obama being “swift-boated.” The GOP isn’t making up novel criticisms of the president so much as it is simply highlighting what everyone already knows. …

William Jacobson says it turns out Elizabeth Warren is not so much interested in diversity.

Obama came under criticism and mockery from the left and right when a photo of his Chicago campaign operation staff had barely a non-white face among them.  All the talk about diversity was not practiced at his HQ.

Elizabeth Warren has a similar problem, and has come under criticism from a liberal supporter when she posted a photo on her Facebook page of her campaign volunteers and interns during a visit by Debbie Wasserman Schultz today: …

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Commentary has a neat story about the respect paid to the small population of Jews who lived in New York in July 1788.

A recent work about the ratification of the U.S. Constitution rescues from oblivion an amazing and moving story about the Jews of post-Revolutionary New York and the solicitude their Gentile neighbors showed them. In the course of describing the ratification process in New York, Pauline Maier’s Ratification (Simon & Schuster, 589 pages) makes fleeting reference to the fact that a huge parade through New York City in 1788 by supporters of the Constitution was put off for a day “to avoid July 22, a Jewish holiday.” This postponement, and its significance, have been lost to history until now.

The rediscovery of this incident is only one of many good reasons for reading Maier’s masterly and groundbreaking account of the state conventions where the proposed federal Constitution was debated and ultimately approved. Maier relies (as no historian before her has or was able to) on the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. This massive work, 23 hefty volumes and counting since the project began in 1976, is a collation of the vast and dispersed contemporary record—minutes, newspaper stories, pamphlets, memoirs, and letters—of the Constitution’s ratification. Maier uses it to show us how, in state after state, public officials and citizens debated with skill and clarity the complex issues facing the country, and how the fairness and thoroughness of the ratification process led to the Constitution’s winning support even from those who were originally its determined opponents. Along the way, she unearths all manner of interesting nuggets about the personalities and events she describes—none more so than the moment in late July 1788 when the supporters of ratification in New York accommodated the religious needs of their Jewish fellow citizens, even at some risk to the success of their cause.

A little table-setting is needed to put the story in perspective. New York’s was one of the last conventions to be held, and its approval of the Constitution was far from assured. New York had long been dubious about the Constitutional project: Two of its three delegates to the Philadelphia Convention had left in protest, objecting to its failure to respect the limited terms on which it had been called. Only the third, Alexander Hamilton, was present to join in the vote by which the Constitution was approved and sent to the states for consideration. The delegates chosen for New York’s convention the next summer contained a clear majority of opponents of ratification (one source puts the breakdown at 46–19 against), and the opponents were led by New York’s powerful governor, George Clinton. While the Federalist proponents were hardly unrepresented—they included Hamilton and John Jay, two of the authors of The Federalist Papers—they certainly faced an uphill battle.

When the convention began, on June 17, 1788, only eight states had ratified, one shy of the nine that the draft Constitution required. One week into the convention, the delegates in Poughkeepsie received word that New Hampshire had ratified, and so the Constitution, by its terms, succeeded the previous Confederation and became the new nation’s governing document. On the same date, Virginia also voted to ratify. Nonetheless, Clinton and the opponents of ratification continued to insist on changes to the document, and still “in mid-July, the two sides remained unalterably apart,” as Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow puts it. The convention did not finally vote to ratify—and then by the narrowest margin in any state—until the end of July, more than a month after the United States had come into existence.

Although by mid-June New York’s approval was no longer required to bring the Constitution into effect, the state’s failure to join the now established United States could well have been a death blow to the new nation. It would have stood as a geographic obstacle to movement between the southern states and New England and, more important, would have deprived the United States of its leading commercial state. …

… The Federalists employed a variety of means (including republication in book form of the celebrated Federalist articles) to bring pressure on the hostile convention to ratify. Among them was the decision to stage what was called a Grand Federal Procession in New York City, to demonstrate the support that ratification enjoyed among all classes of citizens. Similar events had been held in Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston after their states had ratified, and a major procession was held in Philadelphia on July 4, after the actions of New Hampshire and Virginia had brought the American republic into existence.

Planning for the New York Procession had been ongoing throughout June and was originally scheduled to coincide, like Philadelphia’s, with the Fourth of July celebration. But the event kept getting put off, principally, as the chairman of the event later wrote, in the “hope that this state…would likewise accede to the Union.” A postponement was also necessitated because the elaborate parade preparations took longer to complete than had been anticipated. In particular, the construction of a scaled-down frigate, the “Federal Ship Hamilton,” which was to form part of the procession and honor New York’s Federalist leader, would not be ready until July 18.

The procession was finally scheduled for July 22. But, as Maier discovered from two letters contained in the Documentary History, it was put off for an additional day because it turned out that July 22 in 1788 coincided with a Jewish holiday: 17 Tammuz, the day on which the Fast of Tammuz is held. …

Compare that story to the Olympic Committee’s refusal to find time in the opening ceremonies to memorialize the Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 games. Contentions has the story.

In spite of the growing calls for a moment of silence in honor of the 11 Israelis murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the head of the International Olympic Committee said yesterday that he would not alter his determination to refuse to allow the issue to intrude upon the opening ceremonies of the London Games this Friday. Jacques Rogge said yesterday that it “was not fit” for a commemoration of Munich to be included in the gala start to the global athletic extravaganza.

This week, President Obama added his voice to those already calling for a moment of silence at the ceremony. Perhaps even more importantly, Bob Costas, NBC television’s Olympic host, has said that he will impose his own moment of silence on the coverage of the event when the Israeli team enters the stadium:

“I intend to note that the IOC denied the request,” Costas said. “Many people find that denial more than puzzling but insensitive. Here’s a minute of silence right now.”

Costas deserves great deal of credit for not allowing the IOC’s desire to keep the memory of Munich out of sight during the games (Rogge said he will attend a ceremony honoring the Munich victims in Germany next week). But while he finds the refusal to simply devote one minute to remembrance “puzzling,” there is no mystery about it. Rogge has called requests for such a memorial “political.” While there is nothing political about recalling the terrorist attack, by that he means that many of the participating nations are not comfortable highlighting a crime committed by Palestinians or honoring the memory of Israeli Jews. As historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote this past week, the controversy is more proof that in the eyes of the world, spilled Jewish blood remains a cheap commodity.

The symbolism of a moment of silence for the victims of the Munich crime is important because it again reminds us that the rhetoric about brotherhood and peace that is endlessly spouted during the two-week-long Olympics show is empty talk. As Lipstadt notes, no one could possibly doubt that if there were ever an assault on Western or Third World athletes and coaches at the Olympics, the tragedy would always be prominently remembered at opening ceremonies. The only thing preventing Rogge from acquiescing to what would seem to be a simple and easily satisfied request is that doing so would confer legitimacy on Israel’s presence at the Olympics that most of the world would rather not acknowledge. Nor are many of the nations whose flags will be paraded on Friday night happy about even a second being spent about Jewish victims of Palestinian terror. After all, doing so would be implicitly remind the world that Israel remains the one nation on the planet that is marked for extinction by the hatred of many of its neighbors.

While we think Costas’ stand on the moment of silence has added another reason to consider him one of the most thoughtful voices on television, the IOC’s ongoing refusal ought to give the rest of us a reason to skip the globaloney fest altogether.

A pollster comments in The Hill about the large sums the Dems are spending on polling.

What’s up with all that polling the Obama camp is doing? Recently the folks over at the Weekly Standard combed through campaign spending disclosure records of the Obama campaign and related committees, discovering that they’ve spent $15 million on polling since the first of the year. And some of the June spending is still unaccounted for. Oh, my! From one perspective, spending $15 million on polling reeks of desperation. They are on a massive snipe hunt, trying to evaluate the appeal of every alleged accomplishment of the president and to gauge the credibility of every anti-Romney tidbit their dirt-diggers have dredged up. …

… Just by normal ratios or rules of thumb for campaign spending, the research outlays are out of whack. For presidential campaigns, polling should fall into a range of 3 to 4 percent of the total budget. In this case, the percentage is much higher. It is being reported that the Obama campaign has spent $100 million thus far on campaign ads. If they have, in fact, spent $15 million researching those ads, they are genuinely out of control over at the Democratic “research institute” where all this political science is percolating.

It’s interesting to try and follow the money, but it’s also disturbing. Why must Obama spend so much money to find his way? Voters are likely to be turned off to realize that even a teleprompter is not enough for this president. He also needs a phalanx of pollsters to tell him what to say.

Perhaps you remember the published suggestion from a few weeks ago that sitting too much will shorten your life. A WSJ OpEd says fageddaboutit.

You may want to sit down before reading this.

Headlines last week suggested that people who spend a lot of time sitting were in mortal danger. Sitting too long each day could shave two years off one’s lifespan—or, for the glass-half-full crowd, sitting less could extend life by two years, the media reports said.

The study that led to the news accounts cautioned that no such conclusion could be drawn from the available research. Sitting studies haven’t yet fully gotten off the ground, thanks to technological, cost and ethical limitations. Yet the evidence so far all points in the same direction: that sitting more is tied to higher mortality.

But that doesn’t mean the act of sitting itself is deadly. Instead, it could be that people who spend more time sitting are less healthy to begin with, or that those who sit less are using that time in healthier ways such as exercising.

Figuring out all these variables “is where the science needs to go now,” said Peter Katzmarzyk, lead author of the headline-generating sitting study published last week by the online medical journal BMJ Open, and associate executive director for population science at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. “We only have the epidemiological evidence.”

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Andrew Malcolm says this is a critical week for Romney.

… Then Romney’s off to Britain, Israel and Poland for a week of high-level, high-profile meetings. Romney’s style, obviously, is not to make large splashes. So, don’t look for any grand policy pronouncements. 

The point, of course, for presidential candidates with limited diplomatic experience is to be seen back home on a foreign stage, conferring on a par with other leaders. Romney will not be doing anything as stunningly arrogant as Obama’s $750,000 campaign rally in Berlin in 2008.

But he will be at the London Olympics, no accidental reminder of Romney’s fiscal and PR rescue of the scandal-plagued, deficit-ridden Salt Lake City Olympics, turning it into a 2002 international showcase of executive acumen and leadership. That exercise in business planning ended up turning a $101 million profit when organizers had once hoped just to break even. …

…Romney’s travel agent should get a bonus for the Republican’s brilliant itinerary. What do all three stops — Britain, Israel and Poland – have in common? Each one has been roundly and repeatedly dissed by the Obama administration.

Romney doesn’t need to say one word about Obama; the contrast with the Chicago pol is apparent and striking. All Romney need do is look conceivably presidential. And not bow to anyone.

No reminders necessary of the slights to Britain and its leaders, the insulting gifts, the leaks about her “lightweight” prime minister (as opposed to Obama heavyweights like, say, Jay Carney?) and the unnecessary U.S. involvement in Britain’s Falklands dispute with Argentina.

No reminders necessary of Obama’s overheard whine about having to talk with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regularly, his unwillingness to visit the Israeli state during this term that saw so many Obama trips to Muslim countries, Obama’s undercutting of Israeli positions on Palestinian talks and demands and Israel’s growing impatience with Obama’s impotent sanctions on Iran. …

… No reminders necessary either of Obama’s early abandonment of U.S. missile defenses in Eastern Europe or his failure to inform Poland before giving them up as part of his ongoing and ineffective suck-up to Russia. Or Obama’s reference to World War II “Polish death camps” when he presumably meant Nazi. Not to mention Obama’s decision to cancel attendance at the funeral of Poland’s president — in favor of another round of golf.

Romney will also have a private meeting with Nobel laureate and Solidarity hero Lech Walesa, whose request for a similar get-together with Obama was denied. …

David Harsanyi has five ways to fix the economy. He says a little benign neglect might be in order. 

Step one? Please, stop.

It would probably strike the average politician as absurd to argue that the best way to fix the economy is to stop trying to “fix it.” But as John Taylor, former economist at the Council of Economic Advisers and professor of economics at StanfordUniversity, argues, the most effective way to regain our edge is to change the way we think about the economy. This means returning to “first principles.” As an economic matter, Taylor defines this by saying that “families, individuals, and entrepreneurs must be free to decide what to produce, what to consume, what to buy and sell, and how to help others.”

Not exactly a radical notion. Yet, from health care reform to environmentalist policy, from fiscal reform to the gutting of welfare reform, the economic agenda of Washington the past four years—and even longer—has corroded our traditional understanding of economic freedom.

Washington has many immediate tasks in front of it, of course: stopping the fiscal cliff that would result in a bevy of 2013 tax hikes, reforming entitlements and dealing with the explosion of dependency programs. But on a macro level, what the nation needs most, as Taylor argues, is predictable government, the rule of law, incentives that derive from the free-market system rather than activist government.

In other words, we need to get back to basics. Here are five ways Washington can stop “fixing” and start helping:

1. Austerity now!

Not long ago, few Americans knew, or cared, about the Baltic nation of Estonia. Nowadays, the small country is mentioned regularly within free-market economic circles as a pristine example of how cutting back government spending can spur economic growth. As Daniel J. Mitchell, an expert on supply-side tax policy at the Cato Institute who recently toured some Baltic nations tells Human Events, the turnaround in Estonia is real and so are the cutbacks. “They asked themselves a simple question,” Mitchell says, “What do we want? Our government to spend our money or the productive sector of our economy to spend it? Estonia—even though they haven’t been perfect—came up with the right answer.” …

WSJ OpEd on how the internet was really created.

A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.”

It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way. …

Nat Hentoff on “what really shocks me about Obamacare.”

… What still shocks me about this law is the government’s interference with the doctor-patient relationship. Many government bureaucracies will not pay for doctor-prescribed treatments costing more than a predetermined figure. And none of these bureaucracies’ members will have actually seen the individual patient.This may affect elderly patients in particular, but it can happen at any age. 

What has also been hardly mentioned about the high court’s decision is its effect on a tax in Obamacare that could have a powerful — and for some, fatal — impact on Americans at any age. …

In Forbes, John Tamny reviews a book on the new geography of jobs.

… Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs makes the essential case in support of individual mobility, and for doing so is easily the most important read of 2012. The Cal-Berkeley economic professor’s book is extremely necessary for politicians and commentators alike, and it is despite some conclusions from the author that make very little sense. But before addressing some of the book’s wrongs, it’s worthwhile to address just why it’s so worthwhile.

First up is the worship within the political and economic classes of manufacturing jobs. In a book that artfully slays myriad myths that cloud the economic debate, Moretti makes the very important point that to “remain prosperous, a society needs to keep climbing the innovation ladder.” As he notes, China and India are moving heavily into manufacturing at the moment, but that speaks to intense poverty that is the rule in both countries. We’re rich precisely because we’ve evolved upward from the prosaic. In short, the capital markets are the source of all funds for jobs, and investors view factory work as something anyone can do. A rush to factory work, assuming investors would fund it stateside, would mark a move among workers to the jobs of yesterday; albeit at exponentially lower pay.

Rick Santorum took his nostalgia for manufacturing to 2nd place in the recent GOP presidential primary, but lost on his partisans is the simple and happy truth that manufacturing of the labor intensive variety, no matter the tax subsidies, will never return to the United States. Moretti properly sees this as good thing, all the while channeling the late great Warren Brookes (Brookes’ The Economy In Mind another essential read) in reminding readers that yesterday’s (literally and figuratively) manufacturing hubs like Flint, Detroit and Cleveland have repelled capital and talent on the way to becoming ghost towns.

The productive, vital few in the U.S. have put manufacturing in their proverbial rearview mirror, and Moretti chronicles this positive economic evolution. As he so effectively points out with Apple Inc.’s iPhone, the assembly of it (in Shenzhen) is the easy, low-margin aspect of the production process, and as such, “can be done anywhere in the world.” The real money is in the iPhone’s design, that takes place at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, but with regard to the innovative phone’s production, American “hands” happily have no role. As Moretti exults, “when it [the iPhone] reaches the American consumer, only one American worker has physically touched the final product; the UPS delivery guy.” Brilliant, and in describing the process Moretti channels Henry Hazlitt who reminded readers that we can only do so much given the limits of a 24-hour day, and because we’re limited, it’s best to farm out low-margin work so that we can paid for pursuing that which the markets value.

Moving to the China question more broadly, Moretti reminds the reader of the tautology that trade is a two-way street, that amid China’s rise as a productive nation its consumers have come to desire the finer things on the way to a 500% increase of American exports to the country, “more than ten times faster than exports to the rest of the world.” As for Chinese goods that happily reach these shores, Moretti notes that the prices of consumer goods have fallen the most where Chinese imports have increased the most. Far from a negative for the poor and middle class, Moretti writes that “the price index for the poorest 20 percent of families has grown three times more slowly than the price index for the richest 20 percent.” Translated, not only has China’s embrace of manufacturing sped our positive. …

Now it turns out compact fluorescent bulbs can cause skin damage because of UV radiation. Ken Green has the story.

As I’ve written before, (here, and here, for example) there are many good reasons to remove the ban (pardon me, “unattainable performance standard that will serve as a de-facto ban”) on incandescent light bulbs.

Now there’s another reason to add to the list of objections. Besides being expensive, undimmable, slow-to-brighten, giving off ugly light, and containing mercury, compact fluorescent bulbs apparently give off UV radiation that will damage your skin. …

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Salena Zito reports on a Romney rally in the Pittsburgh area last Friday.

… This was not a stacked rally, to which the usual GOP suspects bring a friend, or a ticketed event, for which you go to a local elected official to pick up a pass reserved for people who clap on cue.

This was the real deal — and the crowd, with as many Democrats as Republicans, let Romney know they loved him and his message.

Bill Brasco of nearby Jeannette isn’t just a Democrat. He is an elected Democrat, the local school board president for more than 42 years, the second-longest-serving board president in state history.

“Been a Democrat since I turned 21 and proud of it,” he said, adding that he will not vote for Obama in November.

“I just do not like the direction this country is going under the president.”

Brasco, 75, was one of many Democrats giving Romney more than a dozen standing ovations.

“I could not have been more impressed,” he said. “I particularly liked when he talked about his five-point plan to get the economy roaring.”

Brasco, who spent most of his working career in sales, listed Romney’s points as if he himself had authored them: “Energy, trade, balanced budget, better education through training and skills, and economic freedom. … No, he was impressive, that was an amazing event.” …

Mark Steyn says Obama builds roadblocks, not roads.

… So here’s a breaking-news alert for President Nuance: We small-government guys are in favor of roads. Hard as it may be to credit, roads predated Big Government. Which came first, the chicken crossing the road or the Egg Regulatory Agency? That’s an easy one: Halfway through the first millennium B.C., the nomadic Yuezhi of Central Asia had well-traveled trading routes for getting nephrite jade from the Tarim Basin to their customers at the Chinese court, more than 2,500 miles away. On the other hand, the Yuezhi did not have a federal contraceptive mandate or a Bloombergian enforcement regime for carbonated beverages at concession stands at the rest area two days out of Khotan, so that probably explains why they’re not in the G7 today.

In Obama’s world, businessmen build nothing, whereas government are the hardest hard-hats on the planet. So, in his “You didn’t build that” speech, he invoked, yet again, the Hoover Dam and the Golden GateBridge. “When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden GateBridge, or the Internet, sending a man to the moon – all those things benefited everybody. And so that’s the vision that I want to carry forward.”

He certainly carries it forward from one dam speech to another. He was doing his Hoover Dam shtick only last month, and I pointed out that there seemed to be a certain inconsistency between his enthusiasm for federal dam-building and the definitive administration pronouncement on the subject, by Deanna Archuleta, his Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior, in a speech to Democratic environmentalists in Nevada:

“You will never see another federal dam.” …

David Harsanyi tries to lay down some covering fire for John Sununu.

It seems that one of Mitt Romney’s top surrogates, John Sununu, recently gave us a guided tour of the life cycle of a political gaffe.

First, he wished that President Barack Obama “would learn how to be an American,” and then he amended the comment with a “what-I-really-meant-was” clarification, and finally, he surrendered, as they almost always do, by saying, “I made a mistake.”

But did he? You don’t have to be a birth certificate conspiracy kook to ponder the question. After all, we’re no longer debating whether government should just be huge or whether it should be ginormous anymore. We’re not really wrangling over what levels of debt or spending are acceptable. The president’s central case rests on the idea that individuals should view government as society’s moral center, the engine of prosperity and the arbiter of fairness. Traditionally speaking, that’s not a very American notion. …

Seth Mandel in Contentions says Obama’s mis-step has allowed the Scott Brown campaign to recycle Elizabeth Warren’s “you didn’t build it” rant.

Politico’s James Hohmann points readers of his “Morning Score” to a two-and-a-half minute web ad the Scott Brown campaign will deploy against Elizabeth Warren. It capitalizes on President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line by tying it to Warren, who made similar comments earlier in the campaign. It’s a powerful ad, using audio and video of Democratic presidents–Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton–as well as a few Republicans to drive home the extent to which the current Democratic Party has veered leftward, away from historically bipartisan agreement on the virtue of private industry.

The video then shows Obama delivering his infamous line, and closes with Warren’s–a much harsher version. Warren is frowning, raising her voice, and pointing fingers; as a demagogue, she puts Obama to shame (and that’s saying something). The contention that the Democratic Party has moved left is rather obvious; no one believes that Harry Truman, with his overt religiosity and lack of a college education, could earn the modern Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Equally out of place would be John Kennedy, simultaneously cutting taxes across the board–including for the rich–while promising that we would “pay any price, bear any burden” for the cause of liberty and to ensure the survival of “those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.” …

David Harsanyi says the economy is catching up to the president.

Remember, if these polls are correct, Mitt Romney was making headway just as the Bain Capital attacks were being ratcheted up and the media was focusing on an array of faux controversies. The environment can change as quickly as it takes to make a gaffe, of course, but the fact is, if you look at the internals of these polls, it looks like the Obama economy is finally catching up to the president.

Let’s start with Virginia. If Obama wins Virginia, Republicans can forget about the presidency. And in March, President Obama held a 50-42 percent lead over Romney in a QuinnipiacUniversity poll. By June, Romney had whittled down that lead to 47-42 percent. Today, a new poll has the candidates deadlocked at 44-44 percent.

What should disturb the president’s supporters are some of the internal numbers. Though Romney and Obama are tied,Virginia voters disapprove of Obama job performance by a 51-45 percent margin and 50-47 percent said he doesn’t deserves a second term in office. It is unlikely, at this point, that economic numbers will be improving much before Nov. Clearly, many voters have not warmed to Romney, and perhaps they never will, but there are plenty of votes out there be had.

In the new national CBS/New York Times poll (entire poll here), the candidates are also statistically tied at 47-46. Obama’s approval rating has dropped to 44 percent, with only 39 percent saying he’s doing a good job on the economy — down five points since April.

Whereas once, Obama could blame George W. Bush for all the troubles of the world, 34 percent of those polled  believe Obama now takes “significant” responsibility for the economy and 52 percent of independents say that Obama will “never improve” the economy.

A new NPR poll also finds Romney and Obama tied in battleground states, 46-46.

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor. 

Leno: Obama says his campaign is still about hope. So we’ve gone from ‘Hope & Change’ to ‘No Change, Just Keep Hoping.’

Letterman: Have you seen the new U.S. Olympic team uniforms? To me, nothing says America like a beret.

Fallon: Obama says the 1992 Dream Team was better than this year’s Olympic basketball team. Which is interesting, since a lot of people think 1992’s president was also better than this year’s.

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Weekly Standard spots a liberal Huffington Post writer who is disgusted by Obama’s campaign.

Is the left turning against the reelection campaign of Democratic President Barack Obama? That’s the impression one gets from a recent article in the left-leaning Huffington Post. 

In an article titled, “The Obama Campaign Is Unworthy of a Democratic President,” Georges Ugeux, who identifies himself as the chairman and CEO of Galileo Global Advisors and an adjunct professor at ColumbiaLawSchool, writes, “As a Democrat and a staunch support of Barack Obama, I am completely disgusted by his campaign. Are we talking about the President of the United States? Are we talking about a principled man who has boosted our ideal for a fair and equitable America? Does this have anything to do with the American people?” …

Anna Wintour gets the Roger Simon treatment over Vogue’s gushing piece from last year over the wife of Syria’s Assad.

Events in Syria that seem — emphasis on the seem — to point to the imminent demise of Bashar al-Assad (often referred to as a strongman — more in a moment) have turned my mind again to last year’s coverage of the Syrian regime by Vogue.

Some will recall that in March 2011 the magazine published a glowing profile of Assad’s wife by novelist Joan Juliet Buck titled “Asma al-Assad, A Rose in the Desert.” That encomium has long since been cleansed from the Vogue site, leaving behind their own (stylish?) version of a 404 error.  The original can be found here and elsewhere.  It begins:

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.

It goes on from there, including photographs of the trendy Assads on the floor playing games with their kids, just like your average family in, say, the Upper West Side or Brentwood.

More recently, Vogue publisher Anna Wintour has surfaced as a leading public spokesperson for Barack Obama, making her a fascinating case study in what we might refer to as the psychopathology of the modern liberal. What is their weltanschauung and why do they think the way they do? In other words, just who are these people? …

Michael Barone compares towns in CA and ND.

… Near to glamorous Silicon Valley, with lower rents, it seemed the ideal place for what the Obama Democrats were convinced would be the green energy business of the future, the manufacture of solar panels. Just the place for green jobs!

So Fremont is the site of the gleaming headquarters of Solyndra, the solar panel firm promoted by an Obama megacontributor, which got a $535 million loan guarantee from Obama’s stimulus package.

But the wave of the future turned out to be a stagnant puddle. Solyndra went bankrupt. Meanwhile, Fremont, like most of coastal California, has had continual outmigration to other states and has grown only due to immigrants. It grew only 6 percent between 2000 and 2011.

If the Obama folks back in 2009 thought Fremont was the harbinger of America’s future, one wonders what thoughts they had, if any, about Williston, N.D.

Probably none at all. North Dakota was for many years the state least visited by people from other states, an orderly rural state with about the same population as in 1930. There’s no voter registration because everyone would know if a stranger came in to vote.

On the Missouri River bordering Montana, Williston and surrounding Williams County were quiet farming territory. The county’s population reached 19,000 in 1930, then slumped, and only topped 19,000 again in 2000.

Williams County was the home of Henry Bakken, the farmer after whom the Bakken shale formation was named when it was discovered in 1953. For years geologists knew there was a lot of oil packed into the shale rock, but it was not economic to get it out.

That changed late in the last decade. …

Time now for a look at the behavior of one ABC reporter following the news of the shooting in Aurora. Pajamas Media is first.

ABC News reporter Brian Ross committed what used to be a fatal mistake to a journalist’s career: He blurted out a wild, unsubstantiated, speculative observation that hadn’t been vetted by anyone and was explosively political at the same time.

Via Breitbart:

Here is the exchange between ABC News chief investigator Brian Ross and host George Stephanopoulos about apparent suspect James Holmes:

Stephanopoulos: I’m going to go to Brian Ross. You’ve been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant.

Ross: There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.

Stephanopoulos: Okay, we’ll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much.

Thanks for what? …

The first time we learned Brian Ross was reckless was when the NBC had to cough up $5 million for a story he got wrong. Here’s a NY Times article from 1987.

A Federal district judge has reduced to $5.3 million the $22.8 million libel judgment that the entertainer Wayne Newton won against NBC, ruling that the evidence did not support Mr. Newton’s assertion that television broadcasts linking him to organized crime figures had hurt his reputation or income.

However, the judge, Myron Crocker, has upheld the jury’s determination that the entertainer was defamed and that the network had shown a reckless disregard for the truth.

Judge Crocker said Wednesday that he was convinced the NBC News reporters, Brian Ross and Ira Silverman, had ”serious subjective doubts as to the truth of the broadcasts” but went ahead anyway. …

In a 2006 post in the Blog Sweetness and Light we get a rundown of more of the fast and loose tactics of Mr. Ross. They include the infamous rigged exploding GM truck on Dateline NBC.

Brian Ross of ABC News is the reporter behind the story that Rep. Dennis Hastert is being investigated by the Department Of Justice. Ross is sticking to his charges despite vehement denials from both the DOJ and Hastert himself.

Some may recall that Brian Ross has been involved in past journalistic controversies. Just last week, Mr. Ross reported he was tipped off by unnamed “senior federal officials” that his cell phone was tapped by NSA.

Last month, Ross was one of the first (if not the first) to report that Rush Limbaugh “had been arrested.” Reports which turned out to be greatly exaggerated, but which Ross never corrected.

In January, Brian Ross was the first to promulgate the claims of the self-proclaimed NSA whistleblower, Russell Tice. Ross treated Tice has a highly credible source even though Tice had been cashiered from the agency due to “psychological problems.”

But all of these recent achievements pale in comparison to Mr. Ross’s earlier journalistic lapse, if an earlier entry in Wikipedia is to be believed. For it claimed Ross who was responsible for Dateline NBC’s rigging of truck fuel tanks in 1993.

Here is how the earlier Wikipedia entry for Dateline NBC used to read, via their mirror site at Answers.com: …

Walter Russell Mead calls our attention to a WSJ article on middle aged people drowning in student debt. Would it surprise you to learn the dead hand of government is involved?

… Sadly, government’s fingerprints are all over this mess. In a well-intentioned effort to make higher education more widely accessible, the government offered large student loans without asking many questions. Two things happened.

First, colleges kept raising tuition. College tuition has been rising faster than inflation for quite some time, in part because schools added layers of administrative bureaucracy and offered gold-plated student services. As long as students could rely on government loans to help pay their way, colleges have chosen to compete on amenities rather than on value.

Second, students got out of the habit of thinking about a college education as an economic decision. Students were encouraged by parents, teachers, college guidebooks and guidance counselors to find the school of their dreams rather than a school that they could afford. Unfortunately, if you borrow money, you have to pay it back. Many graduates are now learning this lesson years too late.

Banks and Wall Street, as usual, got into this act too. And with all that student debt on their hands, they lobbied to make sure it couldn’t be discharged in bankruptcy. Now we have $1 trillion of student debt, and a lot of it can’t be repaired. Lives are being damaged, and young people who should be thinking about starting families and careers are instead being saddled with new burdens. …

Here’s that WSJ article.

… Two-thirds of the nation’s $900 billion in student debt is held by Americans under 40, the Fed estimates. But borrowers over 40 are having a particularly tough time with student debt for several reasons, consumer and higher-education experts say.

Many debtors over 40 are still paying balances from college years ago, while their home values and savings have declined sharply in recent years. Some have stopped payments after losing jobs. Many parents—no longer able to tap home equity to pay for their children’s education—are taking out new student loans to do so. An Education Department program that provides loans to parents to fund their kids’ education is among the fastest-growing of the government’s education loan programs.

Student debt has been rising as enrollments and tuition climb. The Fed data show the number of Americans with student debt rose to 37 million this year from 23 million in 2005.

Since 2005, the number of Americans in their 50s with student loans has doubled to 4.6 million, and borrowers in their 60s and older more than tripled to 2.2 million. …

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In the Intellectual Activist, Robert Tracinski gives background on why Romney will win.

… I have been speculating for some time—and others have begun to say the same thing—that Romney’s election strategy can be described as “rope-a-dope.” This was a sports reporter’s coinage for Muhammad Ali’s strategy in the famous 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman. Foreman was a large man known as a hard hitter, so Ali’s strategy was to goad Foreman into throwing a frenzy of punches while Ali adopted a protective position and leaned against the ropes so they would help absorb the energy of the blows. Foreman fell for it and punched away in a fury, tiring himself out in the early rounds only to find himself fatigued while Ali was still fresh. Ali dominated the later rounds and knocked Foreman down long enough for the referee to call him out.

The analogy here is that Romney is letting the Obama campaign punch itself out, spending like crazy on a blitz of negative advertising early on, before swing voters have made up their minds or even paid much attention to the race. Meanwhile, Romney has been holding his fire and money, saving it for when it will really count.

Why is the Obama campaign falling for this? Because they have no other option. Here we have to refer back to the established rules of the horse-race analysis. When a president is running for re-election, it is inherently a referendum on the incumbent, so if his approval ratings are below 50%, he’s in trouble. If a majority disapproves of his performance, that means they are going to be likely to cast their votes for the challenger. Obama is below 50% now. He’s been around 47% in the RealClearPolitics average for a long time now, and since some of the polls tend to overestimate support for Democrats, the real number is probably a few points lower.

But this just means that voters are willing to consider the challenger, and you can still convince them to stop considering him. Which means that an embattled incumbent has only one way to win: convince voters that the challenger is not an acceptable alternative.

Hence the negative campaign against Romney. He needs to be made out as a corporate Snidely Whiplash who lays off workers, outsources their jobs to China, hides his profits in Swiss bank accounts, and lies about it to cover it all up. So that is exactly the story Obama’s negative ads have been trying to tell. The attack ad in which Romney ties the girl to the railroad tracks is coming next.

There is no evidence that these negative ads have worked so far …

… Obama started out with a distinct money advantage, since he could start raising money for the general election while Romney was still spending money on the primaries. But he is rapidly blowing his money advantage. In recent months, he has raised less than Romney and spent a lot more, particularly on his huge spree of negative ads.

Jack Wakeland first pointed this pattern out to me and speculated that Obama is running his campaign finances about as well as he has been running the nation’s finances. The result is that it now looks as if Romney and his supporters will be able to outspend Obama by a significant margin in the final months of the race. …

Andrew Malcolm does a piece on presidential photo-ops and ends with a warning for Mitt.

… Mitt Romney’s communications staff are well-experienced pros. But apparently they’ve been unable to convince their no-nonsense guy to perform in these charades to warm his image. He’s been pretty disciplined on the primary economy-jobs message. He’s fighting back harder now on the silliness over Bain, which was such an evil empire that Obama’s campaigns routinely accepted many thousands in its donations.

Romney does do rope-line handshakes, waves to distant fans and wears jeans, like us. Exciting stuff. But that’s pretty much it for how-ya-doin’ spontaneity.

Over July 4th, imaginative photographers rented a boat and caught an unrehearsed picture of Romney, riding shotgun on a jet-ski with wife Ann. That image would be great for a woman’s magazine, adoring hubby happy with independent wife taking the wheel. For someone auditioning as commander-in-chief, however, such a photo of leading from behind might not be the first-choice image. But his campaign planned nothing else to fill the need for ‘news.’

So far, no county fair cotton-candy for Romney. No merry-go-round rides with grandchildren. No impromptu Little League stops to work the grandstands, praising sun-screened parents for dutifully bearing witness to their youngsters’ positive activities.

Still five weeks of summer left. Romney may loosen up to get in the proactive image game and may win come Nov. 6.

Or he may not. And will not.

Charles Krauthammer has a column on “you didn’t build that.”

… The ultimate Obama fallacy, however, is the conceit that belief in the value of infrastructure — and willingness to invest in its creation and maintenance — is what divides liberals from conservatives.

More nonsense. Infrastructure is not a liberal idea, nor is it particularly new. The Via Appia was built 2,300 years ago. The Romans built aqueducts, too. And sewers. Since forever, infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of government.

The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It’s about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work — the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It’s about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure.

What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. It’s a series of cartoon illustrations in which a fictional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout her life by an all- giving government of bottomless pockets and “Queen for a Day” magnanimity. At every stage, the state is there to provide — preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she’s on her own is at her grave site.

Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s married to the provider state. …

David Bernstein in Volokh has the germ of a good idea we hope will be expanded soon.

… But I did want to point out that government also provides a great deal of what one might call “public bads,” and that these “public bads” often fall heavily on small businesspeople who lack the political power of the crony capitalists (witness the example of my grandfather), who because they often have fixed business assets and roots in their communities often make a tempting target of exploitation by governments (as with my father and the “we’ll find a violation even if you don’t have one or else” protection racket), and who, moreover, don’t have the economies of scale to treat complicated government regulations as a minor business expense. (Public bads tend to fall even more heavily on poor people, but that’s a subject for a different post.)

Kimberley Strassel on the government thugs who divine and act on the president’s wishes.

This column has already told the story of Frank VanderSloot, an Idaho businessman who last year contributed to a group supporting Mitt Romney. An Obama campaign website in April sent a message to those who’d donate to the president’s opponent. It called out Mr. VanderSloot and seven other private donors by name and occupation and slurred them as having “less-than-reputable” records.

Mr. VanderSloot has since been learning what it means to be on a presidential enemies list. Just 12 days after the attack, the Idahoan found an investigator digging to unearth his divorce records. This bloodhound—a recent employee of Senate Democrats—worked for a for-hire opposition research firm.

Now Mr. VanderSloot has been targeted by the federal government. In a letter dated June 21, he was informed that his tax records had been “selected for examination” by the Internal Revenue Service. The audit also encompasses Mr. VanderSloot’s wife, and not one, but two years of past filings (2008 and 2009).

Mr. VanderSloot, who is 63 and has been working since his teens, says neither he nor his accountants recall his being subject to a federal tax audit before. He was once required to send documents on a line item inquiry into his charitable donations, which resulted in no changes to his taxes. But nothing more—that is until now, shortly after he wrote a big check to a Romney-supporting Super PAC.

Two weeks after receiving the IRS letter, Mr. VanderSloot received another—this one from the Department of Labor. He was informed it would be doing an audit of workers he employs on his Idaho-based cattle ranch under the federal visa program for temporary agriculture workers. …