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Dweebs at the NY Times were shocked, shocked, to learn of the respect Paul Ryan pays to Friedrich Hayek. Richard Epstein writes of Hayek’s enduring value.

The wisdom of Hayek is exactly what this country needs right now.

My last column for Defining Ideas, “Franklin Delano Obama,” stressed the dangers of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Second Bill of Rights,” which was long on rights but short on any articulation of their correlative duties. Roosevelt’s program works well everywhere except in a world of scarce resources, which, alas, is the only world we will ever know.

Fortunately, Roosevelt quickly met with some determined intellectual resistance. In 1944, when Roosevelt unveiled his “Second Bill of Rights,” Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian economist, political theorist, and future Nobel Prize winner, wrote The Road To Serfdom. That book rightly became a sensation both in England and in the United States, especially after the publication of its condensed version in The Reader’s Digest in April 1945. Hayek’s basic message was the exact opposite of Roosevelt’s. He was deeply suspicious of government intervention into markets, thinking that it could lead to economic stagnation on the one hand and to political tyranny on the other.

Hayek has never been out of the news. But, right now, his name has been batted around in political circles because Paul Ryan, the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, has acknowledged that he regards Hayek as one of his intellectual muses. That observation brought forward in the New York Times an ungracious critique (called “Made in Austria” in the print edition) of both Hayek and Ryan by Adam Davidson, a co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money. Davidson’s essay reveals a profound misunderstanding of Hayek’s contribution to twentieth-century thought in political economy.

Davidson leads with a snarky and inaccurate comment that, “A few years ago, it was probably possible to fit every living Hayekian into a conference room.” But it is utterly inexcusable to overlook, as Davidson does, Hayek’s enduring influence.  A year after the Road to Serfdom came out, Hayek published his 1945 masterpiece in the American Economics Review, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which has been cited over 8,600 times. In this short essay, Hayek explained how the price system allows widely dispersed individuals with different agendas and preferences to coordinate their behaviors in ways that move various goods and services to higher value uses.

Alas, Davidson’s dismissive account of Hayek does not mention even one of Hayek’s major contributions to weaning the United States and Great Britain from the vices of centralized planning. Thus Hayek’s 1940 contribution to the “Socialist Calculation” debate debunked the then-fashionable notion that master planners could achieve the economic nirvana of running a centralized economy in which they obtain whatever distribution of income they choose while simultaneously making sound allocations of both labor and capital, just like in Soviet Russia.

Hayek exposed this fool’s mission by stressing how no given individual or group could obtain and organize the needed information about supply and demand conditions throughout the economy. The virtue of the price system was its use of a common unit of measurement—money—to allow various actors to compete for a given resource without having to lay bare why they need any particular good or service. The seller need only accept the highest bid, without nosing around in other people’s business. The interaction between buyers and sellers allows for constant incremental adjustments of both price and quantity. Old information gets updated in a quick and reliable way, thereby eluding the administrative gauntlet of the socialist state.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the VP also rans.

In selecting Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as his running mate, Mitt Romney may have significantly changed the trajectory of the race and also the GOP. As to the latter, Ryan’s elevation to the ticket has set back the careers of several rising GOP stars and firmly put the party on the reform track.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made the decision not to run for president in 2012. It wasn’t the “right time.” Maybe President Obama was inevitably going to be reelected. Maybe they needed more experience. For whatever reason, they took themselves out of the presidential race. Then Romney left them off the ticket. Now where do they stand? …

A couple of weeks ago, Niall Ferguson angered the left with his call for Obama to hit the road. Now he is going after higher ed.

School is in the air. It is the time of year when millions of apprehensive young people are crammed into their parents’ cars along with all their worldly gadgets and driven off to college.

The rest of the world looks on with envy. American universities are the best in the world—22 out of the world’s top 30, according to the Graduate School of Education at ShanghaiJiaoTongUniversity. Once it was Oxford or Cambridge that bright young Indians dreamed of attending; now it is Harvard or Stanford. Admission to a top U.S. college is the ultimate fast track to the top.

Little do the foreigners know that all is far from well in the groves of American academe.

Let’s start with the cost. According to the College Board, average tuition and fees for in-state residents at a sample of public colleges have soared by 25 percent since 2008–09. A key driver has been the reduction in funding as states have been forced to adopt austerity measures. In the same time frame, tuition and fees at private universities rose by less (13 percent), but still by a lot more than inflation.

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, total student debt (which includes private loans and federal loans) climbed to more than $1 trillion. It is the only form of consumer debt that has continued to grow even as households pay off mortgages, credit cards, and auto loans. In real terms, students are borrowing twice what they did a decade ago.

It’s not only Facebook stock that Silicon Valley superstar Peter Thiel is selling. He’s shorting higher education, too, arguing that college is the new asset bubble—the natural successor to subprime. …

And Open Market Blog says the higher education bubble is causing a demographic decline among college grads.

… As college costs and student loan debt soar (partly due to opulent university spending) and unemployment rises, young college graduates, crushed by student loan debt, are deciding not to have kids, resulting in demographic decline among the educated in America.  In recent years, student loan debt has skyrocketed from $100 billion to nearly $1 trillion, creating a potential debt bomb for the American economy.

France and England now have higher birth rates than America.  College-educated people in their 20s are definitely more likely to have kids there.  “American fertility is now lower than that of France” and the United Kingdom, notes The Economist, even though American fertility was higher than France or England in 2007.

Why the recent change?  Could it be because college graduates in England and France have less student loan debt? Tuition is lower there.  Per capita expenditures are lower at their elite schools. France and England spend much less on physical plant for colleges and universities. Faculty salaries don’t get as high there.

The buildings at my French-born wife’s alma mater don’t look very impressive, although she studied and learned a lot there.  If a French university outwardly looks more like a high school than a Harvard, that’s OK with them.  What matters to them is the learning that takes place within, not whether it looks like a college marketer’s movie-set image of what a university should look like. French students also study a lot more than American students, so they may be more accustomed to not having spare time (something that may help prepare them to have kids after they graduate, since parents of young children have little free time). …

Donald Boudreaux, the proprietor of the Cafe Hayek blog posted on the tiring memes we hear after each hurricane. One is the complaints about price gouging and the other will suggest the economy will be stimulated by all the construction that will bring our wealth back to even. He provides links to essays that debunk those memes and you can go there if you wish.

As tropical storm Isaac takes direct aim at my hometown of New Orleans, I predict two inevitable occurrences.

First, depending on the severity of the damage done by Isaac, prices of staple goods such as gasoline, bottled water, and plywood will spike in south Louisiana and Mississippi – price increases that will (here’s the prediction) spark a litany of economically uninformed laments about greed and “price gouging.”  So this New Orleans native offers here his thoughts, from April 2005, on price gouging.  No need to thank me.

Second, again depending on the severity of the destruction caused by Isaac, faux-wise commenters – some of whom are on economics faculties – will advise us all to understand the upside of Isaac’s destruction: a ‘stimulated’ economy.  My vanity nudges me here, as above, to share with you some earlier thoughts on this matter.

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The “scientist” who came up the with the fraudulent hockey stick graph of global warming is talking about suing Mark Steyn. James Delingpole wants to raise money to support the suit so it will go to discovery.

Today I’m launching a fund and I wonder whether anyone would like to contribute. Please, I implore you all, PLEASE chip in to help finance Professor Michael Mann’s suit for defamation against sinister, right-wing Canadian climate-change denier Mark Steyn and the fascist-denialist organ for which Steyn writes, National Review Online!

I don’t think Mann is going to win his case, not for one fraction of a millisecond. That’s why I think it’s so important that we give him all the financial encouragement we can at this sensitive early stage. There’s a danger that Mann may yet take advice from his lawyers, realise that there’s about as much chance of his defending the integrity of his ludicrous, comedy “Hockey Stick” curve as there is of George Galloway winning the Random Stranger I’d Feel Most Safe Sharing A Bed With While Completely Fast Asleep award (as annually voted by the readers of Mumsnet) – and pull out.

This must not be allowed to happen.

From obscure beginnings and with little discernible talent, Michael Mann has risen to become arguably the best loved comedy figure in the entire field of climate science, like Fatty Arbuckle, Pee Wee Herman and Coco the Clown rolled into one.

He singlehandedly invented Mann-made global warming using his amazing Hockey Stick curve – the one programmed using the ingenious algorithm whereby, whatever information you fed into it – fudged paleoclimatological reconstructions, the latest football scores, tofu futures – it always came out in the same, scary-looking This Is The End Of The World And We’ve Got To Act Now By Pumping Gazillions More Money Into Climate Research shape.

He gave us the phrase “Hide The Decline” – and starred in the hilarious song and video written in homage by a fan club called Minnesotans For Global Warming.

He described the battle between (apparently) well-funded “sceptics” like myself and “scientists” – ahem – like Michael Mann as “literally like a marine in battle against a cub scout.”

But of all the comedic pleasure this veritable Mickey Mouse among “climatologists” has given us so far, none comes even close to matching the joy and entertainment he will surely give us if he goes ahead with his court action against NRO and Steyn. … 

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Jennifer Rubin posts on Ann Romney’s speech.

She spoke with personal conviction, bringing the crowd to her feet with this personal endorsement of her husband:

… “I know this good and decent man for what he is — warm and loving and patient.

He has tried to live his life with a set of values centered on family, faith, and love of one’s fellow man. From the time we were first married, I’ve seen him spend countless hours helping others. I’ve seen him drop everything to help a friend in trouble, and been there when late-night calls of panic came from a member of our church whose child had been taken to the hospital.

You may not agree with Mitt’s positions on issues or his politics. Massachusetts is only 13% Republican, so it’s not like that’s a shock.

But let me say this to every American who is thinking about who should be our next President:

No one will work harder.

No one will care more.

No one will move heaven and earth like Mitt Romney to make this country a better place to live!” …

Rubin also admired Christie’s efforts.

No one in the GOP gives a speech like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Clapping his hands and punching the air he strode onto the stage at the RNC, and then he proceeded to wow the crowd. If Ann Romney was empathetic, he was tough. If she vouched for her husband, he vouched for Americans. They were the yin and yang of the first night of the convention.

Ironically for a convention with so many people chattering about “likability”, Christie declared, citing his mother, that it is “better to be respected than loved.” It was a powerful counterpoint to the hang-wringing and media fixation over likability.

Christie turned likability, or as he called it, popularity, into a liability. His was a tough message, repeatedly drawing contrasts with the Democrats. “Our ideas are right for America. Their ideas have failed.”

Citing his own improbable success in a deep blue state he made the case for truth telling. Republicans, he said, will tell the people we “have to fundamentally reduce the size of government.” In his view, President Obama is weak and timid. (“They believe the American people need to be coddled.”) Republicans, he urged, “believe in telling seniors the truth.” …

Kim Strassel thinks a second term for Obama would be more of the same. Thank goodness we will avoid it when President Narcisscist goes down in flames.

President Obama has a reputation for talking, but not necessarily for saying much. He has achieved new levels of vagueness this election season. Beyond repeating that he’s in favor of making the “rich” pay for more government “investment,” he hasn’t offered a single new idea for a second term. This is deliberate.

The core of the Obama strategy is to make Americans worry that whatever Mitt Romney does, it will be worse. That’s a harder case for Mr. Obama to make if he is himself proposing change. And so the Obama pitch is that this election is a choice between stability (giving Mr. Obama four more years to let his policies finally work) and upheaval (giving Mr. Romney four years to re-ruin the nation).

The pitch is profoundly dishonest. While the choice between four more years of Obama status quo and Mr. Romney is certainly vivid, it isn’t accurate. The real contrast is between Mr. Romney’s and Mr. Obama’s future plans. And while the president hasn’t revealed what those plans are, there is plenty of evidence for what a second term would look like.

Let’s dispense with the obvious: An Obama second term will be foremost about higher taxes and greater spending. The president has been clear about the former and will consider victory in November a mandate to raise taxes on higher-income Americans and small businesses—at the least. …

Mark Steyn says there is no war on women, but there is a war on children.

… As George Will pointed out this week, nanny-state solutions (such as Michelle Obama’s current campaign to get us all nibbling organic endives) don’t work: Overweight kids in schools with high-calorie junk food, 35.5 percent; overweight kids in schools that banned all the bad stuff, 34.8 percent. Indeed, the bloating of government, of entitlements, of debt, and the increase in obesity track each other pretty closely over the past four decades. If all those debt graphs showing how we’ve looted our future to bribe the present are too complicated for you, look out the window: We are our own walking (or waddling) metaphor for consumption unmoored from production. And, to the Chinese and many others around the world pondering whether America has the self-discipline to get its house in order, a trip to the mall provides its own answer.

So we can’t fight a war in Afghanistan, but we can fight a “war on women” that only exists in upscale liberal feminists’ heads. We can’t do anything about exploding rates of childhood obesity, diabetes and heart disease, but, if you define “health care” as forcing a Catholic institution to buy $8 contraception for the scions of wealth and privilege, we’re right on top of it. And above all, we’re doing it for the children, if by “doing it” you mean leaving them with a transgenerational bill unknown to human history – or engaging in what Boston University’s Larry Kotlikoff, speaking at the International Institute of Public Finance in Dresden last week, called “child fiscal abuse.”

If that sounds a trifle overheated, how about… hmm, “legitimate fiscal rape”? No? Then let’s call it a “war on children.” Unlike the “war on women,” it’s real.

John Fund profiles Artur Davis who will be making a major address at the GOP convention.

Only about 3 to 5 percent of voters are truly undecided between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Focus groups run by Republicans have found that some of the most effective ads appealing to those voters feature Democrats and independents speaking candidly about how they voted for Obama in 2008 but are now disappointed.

That’s one of the reasons that Republicans have decided to showcase former Democratic congressman Artur Davis of Alabama as a “headline” speaker at their convention. Davis, a moderate black Democrat who voted against Obamacare in 2010 and was crushed later that year in a Democratic primary for governor, has since left the Democratic party and is backing Mitt Romney. He was an early Obama supporter — the first Democratic congressman outside Illinois to endorse the candidate in 2007. He seconded Obama’s nomination for president at the 2008 Denver convention.

“The Obama I endorsed was the constitutional-law professor who said he supported the rule of law,” Davis explained to me. “Instead, we got someone who always went to the left whenever he reached a fork in the road.” Now Davis spends a great deal of time describing his conversion to Republican audiences. Even Jamelle Bouie, a writer for the left-wing American Prospect who doesn’t find Davis’s conversion story all that compelling, acknowledges its power. “Davis, like Joe Lieberman before him (and Zell Miller before that), can tell a credible story of ideological alienation,” Bouie wrote in the Washington Post. “He thought the Democratic Party was a big tent, but now — under Barack Obama — it is a haven for intolerant leftism.” …

David Harsanyi with more on the election.

A little more than a year ago, speaking to CBS Sunday Morning, Barack Obama said, “I don’t think we’re in danger of another recession, but we are in danger of not having a recovery that’s fast enough to deal with what is a genuine unemployment crisis for a whole lot of folks out there, and that’s why we need to be doing more.”

“… I expect to be judged a year from now on whether or not things have continued to get better.”

They haven’t.

That’s why Obama and friends are singularly focused on critical issues like Mitt Romney’s tax returns and dog whistles. This month, consumer confidence fell to a nine-month low as Americans continued to be anxious about the economy and unemployment. The Conference Board confidence index fell to 60.6, the lowest level since November. That does not bode well for an unemployment rate that has been over 8 percent for 42 months.

Add to that the fear of rising gas prices — the average price of a gallon of gasoline spiked 23.5 cents last month — and the potential of European and/or Middle Eastern troubles to shake markets, and a lot of people may be feeling like a brittle economy is about to shatter.

But, hey, have you heard that Mitt Romney made a birther joke!? …

Charles Gasparino analyzes Buffett’s portfolio moves and spots a trend.

Is the sky really falling on state and local governments, as Warren Buffett’s recent bearish bet on municipal debt suggests?

Much of the media and even some sophisticated investors think so — even if Buffett’s bet against munis was only cryptically disclosed in a quarterly filing of his investment company Berkshire Hathaway (he has yet to make a public comment on it).

And even if, when you dig deeper, the move suggests Buffett wasn’t making a bet against all munis but only those that adopt some of the same policies he and President Obama are advocating on a national level. …

Powerline introduces the first cartoon today.

Michael Ramirez is in Tampa, attending the convention. He took time out to draw this cartoon, which contrasts Hurricane Isaac with the force that has really brought destruction to America: Barack Obama’s left-wing, crony-socialist policies.

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David Harsanyi sees momentum shift to the GOP.

In the weeks leading up to Mitt Romney’s surprising pick of Paul Ryan as his running mate, dissatisfaction and pessimism within Republican and conservative circles was reaching epidemic levels.

As Romney was being pounded daily by the Obama campaign and liberal groups with a series of brutal ads scrutinizing (and often misrepresenting) his private sector record at Bain Capital, Republicans began to grumble about the GOP campaign. A less than spectacular trip to Europe and Israel confirmed their worst fears. Romney wasn’t on point. Romney wasn’t connecting. Romney was terrible.

And Romney, most definitely, wasn’t tough enough. Popular conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham accused him of bringing a “down pillow to a gun fight.” Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz played on the Romney-is-soft theme, telling the presumptive GOP’s campaign to “put their big boy and big girl pants on.”

Since that time a sea change of opinion has taken hold on the right, as a once-skeptical base has found a reason to embrace Romney (his gutsy call on picking a reform-minded conservative) and the party realists are beginning to think that the former Massachusetts governor’s tactical plan might even work.

It’s still early, of course, and the political establishment is always willing to jump ship, but there seems to be genuine and growing belief that momentum is on the GOP’s side. What is making everyone so confident? Why do they think they can win? Romney surrogates believe aggressiveness, the president’s record and a bold fiscal conservative argument have turned Romney’s fortunes. …

John Podhoretz says Romney has a distinct advantage with his convention speech.

… As far as the convention speeches go, Romney has a surprising advantage over Barack Obama: The gift of novelty. What he will be doing the nation will never have seen him doing before. People will be curious to see how Romney does, interested to hear what he says—and, in a country that has spent a decade watching “American Idol,” will be full of opinions about how he performs.

Obama’s speech will generate nothing comparable. Quite the opposite. In the four years since his nomination in 2008, he has delivered a convention speech, an inaugural address, four State of the Unions, and (by my unofficial count) eight nationally televised prime-time addresses either in front of Congress or from within the White House. He has spoken and spoken and spoken—and at least judging from the response for the past two years, his speeches have not served to push the needle of public opinion in his direction.

So the public knows what Obama has to offer. Those who love him will love him; those who think he’s OK will think he’s OK; everybody else who doesn’t like him to varying degrees are unlikely to alter their views. Which means unless he delivers a masterpiece on September 6, his speech (and the convention that preceded it) are not likely to make much of a difference for him.

For Romney, therefore, the stakes are high and the rewards potentially higher. For Obama, it may just be another day being a rather gabby president.

Podhoretz continues his campaign analysis in the NY Post.

Hurricane permitting, the GOP convention kicks off Monday, and with it, the preliminaries are over and the general election begins in earnest. How stands the race?

At first glance, and even second and third glances, every indication is that we’re in for a nail-biter. The RealClearPolitics average, which aggregates all public polls, now has Barack Obama ahead nationally by a mere point.

The two tracking polls, which survey voters every day and collect data over each three-day period, have the race tied.

There’s reason to think Mitt Romney is in better condition than the national polls show.

First, one has to consider the effect on Romney of the Obama campaign’s unprecedented barrage against him. Chicago spent an astounding $120 million over the summer, much of it on negative ads targeting Romney personally, and almost all of it in 12 battleground states. To give you a sense of how much spending that is, the McCain campaign in 2008 spent a mere $75 million in the general election against Obama in all 50 states.

Though Romney has certainly been bloodied a bit — we all know how he won’t release a lot of his tax returns — the polling from those states and nationally suggests he’s suffered mere flesh wounds. We won’t really know if the Obama campaign managed to cut deeply enough to cause a lingering infection until the general election campaign is in full swing.

But if the infection doesn’t materialize, that will mean the Obama campaign spent tens and tens of millions for nothing. On June 23, Obama was up in the RCP average by 2.4 points. Yesterday, two months later, 1 point. All that spending, and Romney’s position actually improved. …

Jennifer Rubin thinks the Dems were real lucky the storm prevented Biden from making a fool of himself in Tampa.

I suppose the Obama team thought that it was clever to send Vice President Biden to Tampa during the Republican National Convention. It’s the equivalent of trash talking. ( “You think you own Tampa? We own Tampa!”) On Friday it was announced that Biden would not go, out of concern that emergency personnel would be stretched too thin. The Obama team should count its lucky stars that it had reason to cancel.

President Obama did not show good judgment in selecting Biden as the man to step into the presidency at a moment’s notice. Biden is not only long-winded but misguided on virtually every point of foreign policy. His “y’all back in chains” remark is symptomatic of his willingness to say or do anything. Even Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) has called him out for his race baiting. (“Did he think it was cute . . . Yes, he did. Was it something stupid to say? You bet your life it was stupid.”) He is perhaps the last person you’d want in a crisis. It points not only to poor judgment but also Obama’s vanity (Don’t admit an error.).

Obama could have dumped Biden this year; lots of presidents including Democratic idol FDR made a change. But the idea that Obama might need someone’s help (specifically, Hillary Clinton’s) was likely too much to stomach.So he’s stuck with a man who is thought by many to be foolish and slightly out of it.

Meanwhile along comes smart, disciplined, vibrant Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). According to the latest CNN poll, voters — despite his newness on the national scene (for most people) and his status as a mere congressman — find Ryan to be more likable than Biden. Ryan’s favorables are +6, while Biden is at -1. A majority of voters think that the choice of Ryan was excellent or good, and by a substantial margin, they find him to be qualified to serve as president (52 to 43 percent). By a huge 57 to 39 percent, voters think that picking Ryan reflects favorably on Romney’s ability to make important decisions.

So why stick Biden in the same city to highlight that unfavorable comparison? This was arrogance getting the better of the Obama camp. It is fortunate it had reason to cancel.

Imagine what could have occurred. Since his opponent is in town, Ryan might have strolled out from the convention to a Biden event one day. Shake his hand and even suggest a little impromptu debate. Yikes!

Well, there will be time for a full debate in October. It should be an illuminating face-off: fresh ideas vs. hackneyed politics, mathematical precision vs. absurd invention (“The vice president should know better than to spout off half-baked facts in service of a dubious argument.”) and conservative reformer vs. defender of the status quo.

In the meantime, the Romney-Ryan campaign should do all they can to highlight the differences between the two men and what they say about the men at the top of the tickets.

Blogger Joel Runyon has an encounter with an old man at a coffee shop.

… The old man turned back at his coffee, took a sip, and then looked back at me.

“In fact, I’ve done lots of things that haven’t been done before”, he said half-smiling.

Not sure if he was simply toying with me or not, my curiosity got the better of me.

Oh really? Like what types of things?, All the while, half-thinking he was going to make up something fairly non-impressive.

I invented the first computer.

Um, Excuse me?

I created the world’s first internally programmable computer. It used to take up a space about as big as this whole room and my wife and I used to walk into it to program it.

What’s your name?”. I asked, thinking that this guy is either another crazy homeless person in Portland or legitimately who he said he was.

“Russell Kirsch”

Sure enough, after .29 seconds, I found out he wasn’t lying to my face. Russell Kirsch indeed invented the world’s first internally programmable computer and as well as a bunch of other things and definitely lives in Portland. As he talked, I began googling him, he read my mind and volunteered:

Here, I’ll show you

He stood up and directed me to a variety of websites and showed me through the archives of what he’d created while every once in a while dropping some minor detail like:

I also created the first digital image. It was a photo of my son.

At this point, I learned better than to call Russell’s bluff, but sure enough, a few more google searches showed that he did just that. …

Runyon has a follow on to the above post.

After debating a few days whether or not to even share last weeks post, I hit publish. Over the first few days, it got some traffic along with some residual views from  views from my six pack transformation. But Sunday, the piece really took off. It hit the top of Hacker News for 6+ hours,  and got featured on BoingBoing (twice!). In short, over the last few days, the story has received over ~350,000 visits in the past few days and been shared 40,000 times on facebook and 8,000+ times on twitter.

After melting some servers, Russell’s words still reverberated.

Nothing is withheld from us which we have conceived to do.

Do things that have never been done.

All this started from talking to some old man I didn’t know in a coffee shop. It was an incredible conversation and even more incredible experience. Here’s 7 things I’ve learned from my encounter with Russell Kirsch:

Make Stuff

This is really simple.

Make stuff.

Go create something. The only limit on you is what you can imagine. So imagine some impossible things. Then stop waiting around and go create them.

You Are Not That Important – Be Humble

I could have missed out on an incredible encounter if I would have treated Russell like anybody else you see at a coffee shop.

I could have thought I was too important for a tangential conversation with a stranger about Macs and PCs but instead I chose to listen.

On the flip side, a few people commented that Russell needed to learn humility – saying he sounded arrogant. If anything came across like that, it’s my fault in the story telling. If anything, Russell was one of the most humble people I’ve ever met. …

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Charles Krauthammer turns his attention, and ours, to the growing storm in Iran.

… What to do? The sagest advice comes from Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Cordesman is a hardheaded realist — severely critical of the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war, skeptical of the “war on terror,” dismissive of the strategic importance of Afghanistan, and a believer that “multilateralism and soft power must still be the rule and not the exception.”

He may have found his exception. “There are times when the best way to prevent war is to clearly communicate that it is possible,” he argues. Today, the threat of a U.S. attack is not taken seriously. Not by the region. Not by Iran. Not by the Israelis, who therefore increasingly feel forced to act before Israel’s more limited munitions — far less powerful and effective than those in the U.S. arsenal — can no longer penetrate Iran’s ever-hardening facilities.

Cordesman therefore proposes threefold action.

1. “Clear U.S. red lines.”

It’s time to end the ambiguity about American intentions. Establish real limits on negotiations — to convince Iran that the only alternative to a deal is preemptive strikes and to persuade Israel to stay its hand.

2. “Make it clear to Iran that it has no successful options.”

Either its program must be abandoned in a negotiated deal (see No. 1 above) on generous terms from the West (see No. 3 below), or its facilities will be physically destroyed. Ostentatiously let Iran know about the range and power of our capacities — how deep and extensive a campaign we could conduct, extending beyond just nuclear facilities to military-industrial targets, refineries, power grids and other concentrations of regime power.

3. Give Iran a face-saving way out. …

Andrew Ferguson says Romney is an acquired taste.

Now that he’s officially the Republican nominee for president and has an excellent chance of becoming the most powerful man in the world, I feel free to admit, in the full knowledge that nobody cares, that I never liked Mitt Romney. My distaste for him isn’t merely personal or political but also petty and superficial. There’s the breathless, Eddie Attaboy delivery, that half-smile of pitying condescension in debates or interviews when someone disagrees with him, the Ken doll mannerisms, his wanton use of the word “gosh”—the whole Romney package has been nails on a blackboard to me.

Evidently not many of my fellow Republicans agreed. I assumed I was missing something and resolved to dive into the Romney literature, which I soon discovered should post a disclaimer, like a motel pool: NO DIVING. By my count the literature includes one good book, The Real Romney, by two reporters from the Boston Globe. That’s the same Globe with the leftward tilt to its axis and a legendary anti-Romney animus—which lends authority to their largely favorable portrait. The flattering details of Romney’s life were so numerous and unavoidable that the authors, dammit, had no choice but to include them. …

… The Real Romney adds other traits that will continue to grate—he’s a know-it-all and likely to remain so, and his relationship to political principle has always been tenuous. Which makes him a, uh, politician. But now I suspect he’s also something else, a creature rarely found in the highest reaches of American politics: a good guy.

Toby Harnden has a great article on Obama’s ‘joyless slog’ to November.

Barack Obama was swept to the White House in 2008 by a wave of idealism and inspirational campaigning in which he encapsulated the mood of the nation with his slogans of ‘Hope’, ‘Change’ and ‘Yes we can’.

Then, his message was a fundamentally positive one. Americans wanted an end to the Bush era but that almost went without saying. Obama pointed to his own vision of the country; a post-partisan, post-racial America in which gridlock in Washington was ended and common-sense centrist solutions were adopted.

What a difference four years makes. Obama is campaigning ferociously for a second term – and he is a candidate who would have probably have been disdained by the Obama of 2008.

Obama is waging a relentlessly negative campaign of changing the subject from the one that, overwhelmingly, most Americans care about – the economy. Every week there is a new issue his campaign seizes on, preferring to talk about something, anything other than jobs and 8.3 per cent unemployment.

While Obama is still drawing sizable crowds, they are nothing like the size of those who flocked to see him in 2008. …

Yuval Levin says the Dem strategy is to lie their way to November.

Last week I spoke with a journalist who covers health care who was marveling at the trouble the Democrats had allowed themselves to get into on Medicare — thanks to Obamacare on the one hand and the Romney-Ryan plan on the other, it’s suddenly Democrats who would cut the program for current seniors but would fail to save it from collapse and Republicans who would leave current seniors protected and stand a real chance of saving Medicare (and the federal budget) in the long run. In their attempt to run away from this new reality, the Democrats have found themselves pushed into a series of increasingly implausible and unserious defenses and seemed to be losing ground on Medicare, which they had hoped might be their strongest issue this year. “So what will they do?” I asked him. He didn’t hesitate: “They’ll just lie.” He thought they would revert to the same story they have told for years — Republicans will increase seniors’ costs and destroy Medicare and Democrats won’t — and assume that people will just believe it.

That certainly made sense, and we now know he was right. On Saturday, the Obama campaign released this ad attacking the Romney Medicare proposal. The ad doesn’t walk some sort of narrow line between misleading and deceiving, it’s just simply a pack of lies from top to bottom.

The ad’s most significant claim is that “instead of a guarantee, seniors could pay $6,400 more a year” under the Romney plan — a claim attributed on the screen to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. As the Obama campaign well knows, since it has been called on this particular deception before, this claim of $6,400 in cost shifting is from a 2011 CBPP analysis based on a 2011 CBO analysis of an older version of premium-support, and simply does not apply to Romney’s plan. A similar calculation applied to Romney’s plan would show cost shifting not of $6,400 but of zero dollars. …

Lots of good news out of Massachusetts. Legal Insurrection thinks Liz Warren is going the way of Martha Coakley.

… Earlier this week PPP released a poll showing Brown ahead by 5 points, and people were stunned particularly on the left.

For the first time in their adult lives, the progressive movement is wondering out loud whether the “nice guy” Brown is beatable at all, and whether Warren is up to the task.  Demands that Warren “nationalize” (how fitting a word!) the race are increasing.

Warren herself seems desperate to lash out on the war on women theme so much so that she is becoming a caricature.

All in all, there is a sense in the air that resembles what took place in early January 2010 when the political world collectively came to the realization that the Democrats had nominated a seriously flawed candidate, and were up against a guy with a unique political talent and ability to connect with the folks.

Make no mistake, Warren’s bizarre handling of her false claim to Native American ancestry has compounded if not caused the problem, as it revealed a personality defect which is not very becoming.

PPP’s results now have been confirmed by a second poll just released which shows Brown up by 6 points (via Weekly Standard): …

Michael Barone says things are not so great at GM.

… Obama talks about the auto bailout frequently, since it’s one of the few things in his record that gets positive responses in the polls. But he’s probably wise to avoid probing questions, since the GM bailout is not at all the success he claims.

GM has been selling cars in the U.S. at deep discount and, while it’s making money in China — and is outsourcing operations there and elsewhere — it’s bleeding losses in Europe. It’s spending billions to ditch its Opel brand there in favor of Chevrolet, including $559 million to put the Chevy logo on Manchester United soccer team uniforms — and just fired the marketing exec who cut that deal.

It botched the launch of its new Chevrolet Malibu by starting with the green-friendly Eco version, which pleased its government shareholders but which got lousy reviews. And it’s selling only about 10,000 electric-powered Chevy Volts a year, a puny contribution toward Obama’s goal of 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

“GM is going from bad to worse,” reads the headline on Automotive News Editor-in-Chief Keith Crain’s analysis. That’s certainly true of its stock price.

The government still owns 500 million shares of GM, 26 percent of the total. It needs to sell them for $53 a share to recover its $49.5 billion bailout. But the stock price is about $20 a share, and the Treasury now estimates that the government will lose more than $25 billion if and when it sells. …

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In Pajamas Media, Roger Kimball posts on Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek article and the following firestorm of left-wing invective.

… Ferguson writes:

Welcome to Obama’s America … nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return — almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation — half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.

We are fast becoming a two-tier nation, a small band of makers and an increasingly large band of takers.

This is just the beginning of the bad news which Ferguson has assembled. He goes on to marshal the facts about Obama’s profligate spending, U.S. debt, the true cost of ObamaCare, and more. What Ferguson has to say about Obama’s handling of the foreign policy challenges facing America is especially sobering:

Far from developing a coherent strategy, he believed — perhaps encouraged by the premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize — that all he needed to do was to make touchy-feely speeches around the world explaining to foreigners that he was not George W. Bush.

Bottom line on the foreign policy front: “America under this president is a superpower in retreat, if not retirement.”

I said that I found Ferguson’s analysis damning. So, I gather, did the Left. For out of those mephitic swamps of “progressive” animus has risen a great cloud of anguished repudiation. It’s a violent, unpleasant, and ultimately unconvincing display, but it is certainly full of angry pathos.

It has already elicited from Ferguson a long, detailed, and utterly deadly point-by-point reply, which is as entertaining as it is authoritative. Ferguson begins with a splendid quotation from the historian Macaulay: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” Macaulay had not had the experience of witnessing the left-wing commentariat tie itself in moralistic knots in its hapless attempt to answer facts with name-calling. Connoisseurs of futility will find it as entertaining as psychologists will find it alarming.

Ferguson shows in unanswerable detail that his critics adopt a three-pronged strategy of evasiveness. First, they avoid his central arguments. Second, they claim to be challenging the facts he has marshaled, when all they really do is purvey opinions masquerading as facts. Third, they nitpick and name-call. …

 Matthew Continetti’s take down of Jane Mayer’s latest in the New Yorker (“Schmooze or Lose” ) takes awhile to hit its stride, but then it is strong. Read this and see why the New Yorker is top Obama flack in the Northeast media.

I don’t know whether President Obama or Mitt Romney will win on November 6, but I do know what the MSNBC talking heads will say in the event that Obama loses. They will say that Republican billionaires bought the election; that Republican legislators suppressed the minority vote through onerous photo identification requirements; and that Romney frightened white working class voters into thinking Obama favored minorities over other groups. They will say the 2010 Citizens United decision allowed Republican billionaires to inject undisclosed “dark money” into American politics, and Democrats could not compete because they had no financial interest at stake, no Charles Koch or Sheldon Adelson of their own.

I also know that every rationale uttered by Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz will advance their theological belief in the moral purity and benevolent intentions of modern day progressives. This foundational idea—that Republicans act out of self-interest while Democrats act out of the public interest—is the keystone to the self-conceptualization and self-idealization of your everyday Democrat. It’s simplistic and bogus. And it is the biggest myth of campaign 2012.

Take for example the left-wing activist Jane Mayer’s latest article in the New Yorker,…

… “Schmooze or Lose” had not been on newsstands for more than a few days when the New York Times came out with a blockbuster report on the administration’s relationship with the Exelon Corporation, an Illinois-based utility giant whose executives “were early and frequent supporters of Mr. Obama as he rose from the Illinois State Senate to the White House.” Rahm Emanuel helped create this energy beast. David Axelrod consulted for it. One of Exelon’s board members, Jim Rogers, is the chairman of another huge utility, Duke Energy, and a major backer of this year’s Democratic National Convention. “White House records show that Exelon executives were able to secure an unusually large number of meetings with top administration officials at key moments in the consideration of environmental regulations that have been drafted in a way that hurt Exelon’s competitors, but curb the high cost of compliance for Exelon and its industry allies,” the Times reported. I hasten to add that the Washington Free Beacon broke the story of how Exelon “won a 20-year contract to provide renewable energy to 10 State Department facilities, including its Foggy Bottom headquarters, as well as a portion of the White House campus” with solar panels manufactured in American prisons.

Does Jane Mayer read? This is not a rhetorical question. She quotes another anonymous donor who asks, “Where’s Penny Pritzker? Where’s George Soros?” Yet one does not need a GPS to discover that the Hyatt heiress Pritzker was on Air Force One with the president in late July, when the discussion no doubt was confined to how Pritzker “would like to be involved.” One of Mayer’s informants says that the hedge fund billionaire Soros, who like Pritzker has given the maximum individual contribution to Obama, “is not inclined to take an outsized role in the 2012 campaign.” Why? A “Democratic donor” says: “He feels hurt.” Aw. Or maybe he’s tied up with his twenty-something ex-girlfriend’s $50-million lawsuit; or planning his upcoming wedding to a 40-year-old video yoga instructor; or investing in Manchester United after the soccer team inked a $600 million endorsement deal with U.S. government-backed GM.

Or maybe Soros is busy with the Democracy Alliance, the secretive organization of Democratic donors that he helped organized in 2005 and in which he continues to participate. Mayer describes the Alliance as “a group of wealthy liberal donors led by Rob McKay, an heir to the Taco Bell fortune.” That is true, but Mayer does not mention Soros’s involvement in the organization. The ace reporter who exposed the secretive Koch brothers does not even deign to note that the Democracy Alliance refuses to disclose the identities of its members, let alone the organizations that receive their generous financial support. She focuses instead on shoe magnate Arnold Hiatt: “In November, Hiatt asked the President to speak to the group, but Obama declined; the White House said that he was too busy.” Ah, well. I guess that settles it. No Democracy Alliance for Obama.

Except here, too, Mayer omits inconvenient truths. Joe Biden must not be busy at all, because he personally addressed a Democracy Alliance conference in November 2011, a few months before the Alliance made the strategic decision to focus more on electing Democrats to office and less on the utopian cause of the moment. Nor was Obama “too busy” in January of this year, when his motorcade spirited him to the St. Regis hotel near the White House, where he solicited funds at an event organized by McKay and whose attendees, according to Politico, were “mostly alliance members.” Neither solicitation appears in the New Yorker. Indeed, while Mayer goes on at length about McKay, she somehow fails to inform the elite readership of the New Yorker that the gordita-muncher sits on the board of Obama’s own secret money machine, Priorities USA, last seen accusing Mitt Romney of murder.

A similar cognitive blind spot must be responsible for the bizarre way in which Mayer handles Dreamworks CEO and Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of Obama’s biggest supporters and a multi-million-dollar donor to Priorities USA.

Mayer writes: “Katzenberg has been invited to a state dinner at the White House, but he has never met privately with the President.” No, not privately. Just publicly: Are we really to believe Obama had no meaningful interaction with one of his biggest donors during the White House event? Obama has called Katzenberg “an extraordinary friend,” and a “remarkable” man. Why does Mayer not report on the $15 million fundraiser Katzenberg co-sponsored at George Clooney’s home, where the president said,

I want to thank Jeffery not just for this evening but for his tenacious support and advocacy since we started back in 2007. He has just been consistently been there for me through thick and through thin. Sometimes the 2008 campaign gets romanticized and everybody says how perfect it was and I have to remind them, no, I was there. (Laughter.) And the only person I don’t have to remind is Jeffery, because he was there through all the ups and downs.  And occasionally he would call and say, Barack, I don’t think things are working the way they’re supposed to. (Laughter.)  But no matter where we were and what phase we were in, in that campaign, he stuck with us.  And over the last three and a half years he’s remained just an extraordinary friend.

So, Jeffery, thank you for everything you’ve done. (Applause.)

Earlier this year Katzenberg was among the guests at a private luncheon at Vice President Biden’s residence for Xi Jinping, who is presumed to become the next president of China this fall. Katzenberg required Xi’s personal approval for a major deal to open an animation studio in China. Dreamworks, meanwhile, is under investigation by the SEC for its dealings with China. Needless to say, none of this shows up in Mayer’s “report.” …

Andrew Malcolm catches President Narcissist with another jawdropper. Here’s the whole post.

Barack Obama has become accustomed to being the center of attention. For many like him, that’s one of the biggest appeals of politics, the television exposure it attracts and the power that seems to come with that instant recognition and fame. “As Advertised on TV”

When you walk into a room now where pre-screened people have paid sometimes $40,000 just to be in your earthly presence, people stand, heads turns, lips whisper and hands clap. That’s a heady experience, even if you weren’t raised by grandparents because your birth parents chose to be absent. A modest upbringing, it seems, does not guarantee modesty.

Although Obama’s school grades remain sealed secrets, he’s often been told that he’s intelligent and interesting and articulate.

To quote the 20th century American philosopher Mel Brooks, “It’s good to be king!”

Obama was in New York City again last night (yes, money). It seems he wants four more years of attention; never mind the doing nothing. So, he must appear to mingle and recognize and shine his large smile on donor faces.

While others cash the checks because, unexpectedly, Obama’s way behind now in the political popularity contest measured with dollars as the votes. Another reason to dislike that poised former governor fellow, who thanks people.

It’s one thing to play off the fame of Sarah J. Parker and Anna Don’t-Be-Late. In Obama’s world, they’re merely useful. But it’s quite another to be in the presence of Michael Jordan and other NBA brethren, who’ve accomplished real things in their life’s work that Obama could only dream of.

Even though, you know, friends and staff, tell the president that his basketball skills could have taken him well beyond Hawaii gyms.

Anyway, it seems all this struck the president of the United States at the top of his remarks to the Lincoln Center crowd filled with numerous basketball luminaries. He said no, it’s OK, he understands others getting the attention.

He didn’t say anything about liking it:

“It is very rare I come to an event where I’m like the fifth or sixth most interesting person. Usually the folks want to take a picture with me, sit next to me, talk to me. That has not been the case at this event and I completely understand.”

You knew Jennifer Rubin would have at this.

In any White House, it is easy to develop a siege mentality and reject not only criticism but the facts on which that criticism is based. This presidency is particularly susceptible to this malady because of President Obama’s acute narcissism.

Even, or maybe especially, his humor reflects his self-absorption. Where President George W. Bush was self-deprecating, Obama is self-satisfied. That’s how he winds up with cringe-inducing lines such as this at the NBA fundraiser: “It is very rare that I come to an event where I’m like the fifth- or sixth-most interesting person.” (He’s not interesting by the way. Clinton was interesting;Obama is drearily predictable.) The comment is so intellectually needy, you wind up admiring Bush and Ronald Reagan, neither of whom would dream of saying such a thing, even in jest. …

James Pethokoukis has the facts to counter the claim that Obama’s ‘recovery’ created more jobs than Reagan’s. That was from Stephanie Cutter. Or is that Gutter?

… Just how do the Obama and Reagan recoveries stack up in terms of jobs?

• From the end of the recession in June 2009 through July 2012 — the first 37 months of the Obama recovery — the U.S. economy has generated 2.7 million net new jobs. From the jobs low point in February 2010, the U.S. economy has generated 4 million net new jobs.

From the end of the 1981-82 recession through the end of 1985 —  the first 37 months of the Reagan recovery — the U.S.created 9.8 million net new jobs. And if you adjust for the larger U.S. population today, the comparable figure is more than 12 million jobs. …

John Steele Gordon posts on the CU prediction of Romney romp.

Predicting the outcome of elections is big business. In the early days it was left to political professionals who would rely on their gut instincts to “feel” how  the campaign was developing. This is not dissimilar to Wall Streeters who can “read the tape” to sense which way particular stocks will move. In the mid-20th century scientific polling developed, but with occasional spectacular failures. The Literary Digest poll in 1936 predicted an Alf Landon victory over FDR. Landon carried only Maine and Vermont. Everybody was wrong about the outcome of the 1948 election, epitomized by the picture of a triumphant Harry Truman holding up a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with its premature headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

In recent years, Intrade has allowed people to bet real money on the outcomes of elections, in effect measuring the gut instincts of the many. It currently has Obama’s chances at 57.3 percent and Mitt Romney at 42.3 percent.

And, of course, political science professors try as well to read the tea leaves. Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia is probably seen more often on television than other professor. He currently has the race at 237 electoral votes safe, likely, or leaning to Obama, 206 to Romney, with 95 in the tossup category.

Two professors at the University of Colorado, Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry, have developed a prediction model based not on polling or gut instincts, but on economic factors in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia:

According to their analysis, President Barack Obama will win 218 votes in the Electoral College, short of the 270 he needs. And though they chiefly focus on the Electoral College, the political scientists predict Romney will win 52.9 percent of the popular vote to Obama’s 47.1 percent, when considering only the two major political parties. . . .

“What is striking about our state-level economic indicator forecast is the expectation that Obama will lose almost all of the states currently considered as swing states, including North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida,” Bickers said.

You can take this for what it’s worth, but I will point out that this model has correctly predicted the outcome for every presidential election beginning in 1980.

Salon notes Indiana pot growers are having a tough summer.

Police say marijuana growing operations in southern Indiana are easy to spot from the air because of the drought.

An airplane pilot guided troopers on the ground through browning forests and corn fields Tuesday to uncover grow sites in Clark, Scott and Harrison counties. The troopers cut down more than 100 marijuana plants.

Sgt. Jerry Goodin tells The Courier-Journal the resilient green marijuana plants “stick out like a sore thumb.”

Trooper Mike Bennett tells The News and Tribune that marijuana can flourish in harsh conditions, pointing out, “It’s not called weed for nothing.”

Bennett says the seized plants will be destroyed once a burn ban is lifted.

He says the owners of property where marijuana grows are rarely arrested, because most “have no idea that it’s growing on their land.”

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Time to look at the Obama presser on Tuesday. The Streetwise Professor Craig Pirrong is first.

If a foolish consistency is a hobgoblin of little minds, Obama must be very broad minded indeed, because his policies on Libya and Syria have been wildly inconsistent: the “responsibility to protect” logic that underpinned the Libyan intervention (as equivocal as it was) would certainly justify intervention in Syria.  But Obama has avoided even the suggestion of intervention in Syria like the plague.

Until now.  He has drawn a red line, but in so doing, he sows confusion rather than producing clarity:

Seeking re-election in November, Obama noted that he had refrained “at this point” from ordering U.S. military engagement in Syria. But when he was asked at a White House news conference whether he might deploy forces, for example to secure Syrian chemical and biological weapons, he said his view could change.

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” Obama said. “That would change my calculus.”

“A whole bunch of chemical weapons”?  ”A whole bunch”?  Really?  WTF constitutes “a whole bunch”?  Is he saying to Assad that he can move around and use a few chemical weapons, as long as he doesn’t cross the “whole bunch” line?  Wherever that is.

Excuse me while I go pound my head on the floor.

OK.  Back now.

Look.  There is a principle often invoked in foreign policy, and politics generally, of “constructive ambiguity.”

Jennifer Rubin watched also.

In an effort to soothe the increasingly peeved White House press corps, the president appeared in the White House Briefing Room today to take a few questions. It was a remarkably ineffective performance, which the White House must hope that few people watched.

Among other untruths, the president insisted, “Nobody accused Mr. Romney of being a felon.” Well, other than deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter. With regard to his super PAC ad claiming that Mitt Romney, in effect, killed a woman, President Obama maintained, “I don’t think Governor Romney is somehow responsible for the death of the woman that was portrayed in that ad. But keep in mind, this is an ad that I didn’t approve, I did not produce, and as far as I can tell, has barely run. I think it ran once.” Well, except the woman’s husband, Joe Soptic, was trotted out for an Obama campaign press conference.

Even more ludicrous was Obama’s answer on welfare reform. …

Rubin says if Obama’s claims he is not negative were true, he could do the following;

… So what could Obama do if he really wanted to raise the debate? He could fire Stephanie Cutter. (Throwing overboard aides who merely followed directions is a tried-and-true political tactic.) He could denounce the Soptic ad. He could introduce his own reforms on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He could even embrace Simpson-Bowles. It’s not too late for that. Certainly this would dispel the notion that he is unserious about the fiscal debt, is unwilling to take on his own party and is interested only in growing the size of government. He could even undo the damage wrought by his welfare maneuver. (Mickey Kaus has some good suggestions including, “Have Obama argue that the new waivers were justified, but regret that they weren’t adopted with the bipartisan consultation he thinks would produce a reasonable consensus around the need for a modest amount of state-by-state flexibility and experimentation. In keeping with this sentiment, have HHS secretary Sebelius withdraw the rules until they can be negotiated in 2013 with Congressional Republicans, which (Obama can say) will certainly insure that the work requirements are not, in fact, eroded.”)

But I don’t think Obama wants to or is capable of doing any of that. He has spent no time developing farsighted policies, and he is determined to prove that he can turn out his base with fire and brimstone speeches and attack ads. His sycophantic spinners will have to live with that reality. This is precisely the sort of pol whom Obama warned us about in 2008.

Andrew Malcolm says don’t believe this presser was a spur of the moment thing. 

“Looks like there’s a surprise guest here,” said Obama press secretary Jay Carney, sounding not the least bit surprised.

Indeed, his boss took the podium in the White House briefing room Monday to make a statement and then answer a few questions (scroll down for full text). But there was as much surprise to this abbreviated Q&A as the Chicago River turning green on St. Patrick’s Day.

Here’s how it works in this president’s communications strategy:

He hasn’t taken questions from Washington beat reporters in two months. Why? Because he doesn’t want to answer carefully-crafted questions about the economy, the lousy unemployment rates among key sectors of voters like women, blacks and youths, the stunning tastelessness of the ads supporting his candidacy and why he’s fallen so far behind the Republican ticket in recent money-raising. …

Tuesday we gleefully led with Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek cover piece titled “Hit the Road, Barack.” Well, the left blogosphere went nuts over the Harvard history prof’s treatment of St. Barack. Ferguson doubles down in the Daily Beast. The left crazies are going to wish they left him alone. It is better than his first effort. A nice way to start the weekend.

The other day, a British friend asked me if there was anything about the United States I disliked. I was happily on vacation and couldn’t think of anything. But now I remember. I really can’t stand America’s liberal bloggers.

“We know no spectacle so ridiculous,” Lord Macaulay famously wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” But the spectacle of the American liberal blogosphere in one of its almost daily fits of righteous indignation is not so much ridiculous as faintly sinister. Why? Because what I have encountered since the publication of my Newsweek article criticizing President Obama looks suspiciously like an orchestrated attempt to discredit me. 

My critics have three things in common. First, they wholly fail to respond to the central arguments of the piece. Second, they claim to be engaged in “fact checking,” whereas in nearly all cases they are merely offering alternative (often silly or skewed) interpretations of the facts. Third, they adopt a tone of outrage that would be appropriate only if I had argued that, say, women’s bodies can somehow prevent pregnancies in case of “legitimate rape.”

Their approach is highly effective, and I must remember it if I ever decide to organize an intellectual witch hunt. What makes it so irksome is that it simultaneously dodges the central thesis of my piece and at the same time seeks to brand me as a liar. The icing on the cake has been the attempt by some bloggers to demand that I be sacked not just by Newsweek but also by Harvard University, where I am a tenured professor. It is especially piquant to read these demands from people who would presumably defend academic freedom in the last ditch—provided it is the freedom to publish opinions in line with their own ideology.

Let me begin by restating my argument. President Obama should be judged on his record in office. In my view, he has not only failed to live up to the high expectations of those who voted for him, but also to the pledges he made in his inaugural address. (In order to be fair, I deliberately did not judge his performance against his campaign pledges.) The economy has performed less well than the White House led us to expect, despite a bigger increase in national debt than it led us to expect (exhibit 1). …

… Now, we come to the third part of the strategy. First, duck the argument. Second, nitpick. Third, vilify.

First prize goes to Berkeley professor Brad DeLong, whose blog opened with the headline “Fire-His-Ass-Now.” “He lied,” rants DeLong. “Convene a committee at Harvard to examine whether he has the moral character to teach at a university.” My own counter-suggestion would be to convene a committee at Berkeley to examine whether or not Professor DeLong is spending too much of his time blogging when he really should be conducting serious research or teaching his students. For example, why hasn’t Professor DeLong published that economic history of the 20th century he’s been promising for the past six years? It can’t be writer’s block, that’s for sure.

Runner up is James Fallows of The Atlantic for his hilariously pompous post “As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize.” Well, as an Oxford alum, I laugh.

In third place comes Krugman with his charge of “unethical commentary … a plain misrepresentation of the facts” requiring “an abject correction.” The idea of getting a lesson from Paul Krugman about the ethics of commentary is almost as funny as Fallows’s apologizing on behalf of Harvard. Both these paragons of the commentariat, by the way, shamelessly accused me of racism three years ago when I drew an innocent parallel between President Obama and “Felix the Cat.” I don’t know of many more unethical tricks than to brand someone who criticizes the president a racist.

And, finally, a consolation prize for righteous indignation goes to Dylan Byers of Politico (“ridiculous, misleading, ethically questionable”).

I could, of course, go on. By tonight there will doubtless be more. The art of the modern witch hunt is to get as many like-minded bloggers as possible to repeat and preferably exaggerate the claims until finally it becomes received opinion that you are on the brink of being fired and indeed deported in chains.

I don’t usually waste time on this kind of thing. In the Internet age, you can spend one week writing a piece and the next three responding to criticism, most of it (as we have seen) worthless.

But there comes a point when you have to ask yourself: has the American public sphere so degenerated that it is now impossible to make the case for a change of president without being set upon in cyberspace by a suspiciously well-organized gang of the current incumbent’s most ideologically committed supporters?

Now that really would be something to dislike about this country.

So how is Fauxcahontas doing in her campaign in Massachusetts? Michael Graham brings us up to date.

Does Liz Warren really believe that Scott Brown is pro-rape? Or wants to somehow “redefine rape” in a way that would hurt women or benefit racists?

Of course not.

But is Liz Warren willing to smear Scott Brown by suggesting he’d do all this — and more — as part of a “war on women?”

She already has.

The first Massachusetts Senate candidate to denounce Missouri moron Todd Akin was Scott Brown. Liz Warren’s denunciations, along with pretty much the entire Western world’s, soon followed.

Of course Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Scott Brown denounced Akin’s idiocy. There is no “legitimate rape” caucus anywhere in American politics.

“Scott Brown and other Republicans want to pretend Todd Akin is an isolated individual, but he is clearly in line with the Republican agenda,” Warren said in a statement.

And what, according to Warren, is that agenda?

“To limit access to health care. . . to select a vice presidential nominee someone who co-sponsored legislation with Rep. Akin to ‘redefine rape,’ ” Warren says.

Got that, ladies? Forget Brown’s record, forget his denunciation of this Akin dope, forget how he’s actually lived his entire life: Scott Brown hates women! He’s soft on rape! Run before he molests you himself!

This is how low Liz Warren is willing to go, how much of her own dignity she’s willing to destroy, just to — as her campaign put it in a fundraising mailer — “win back Ted Kennedy’s seat.”

Ah, yes, Ted Kennedy. The exemplar of the virtuous treatment of women . . .

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James Pethokoukis reacts to the claim by some hack that Paul Ryan is not serious.

Paul Krugman attacks Paul Ryan as an “unserious man” because, as Krugman does the math, the Ryan budget plan doesn’t add up. Using Tax Policy Center data, Krugman says Ryan’s tax reform would lose $4.3 trillion over the next decade while his budget cuts would only save $1.7 trillion. “Over all, the effect would be to increase the deficit by around two and a half trillion dollars,” Krugman writes in his New York Times column today.

Now let’s recall that referring to this budget, the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the following:

As with last year’s budget, Chairman Ryan deserves a lot of credit for his proposals to get spending under control over the long-term. Even taking out any claimed savings from no doc fixes and leaving in the sequester, the House Republican budget still looks better than most other prominent plans out there by putting debt on a clear downward path — a very encouraging element of the plan.

But that’s an appeal to authority. Let appeal to math and economics instead. …

Commenter on Ace of Spades Blog lets fly.

As a small business owner all I can say is that I think the current sentiment in the small business community is that we didn’t sign up for this shit. Y’all can vote for whatever the hell you want but we are not going to be a part of it.

I have seen more owners get out of the business or retire in the past couple of years than ever before and with the ACA on the horizon the jobs these businesses produced will not be replaced. The economics no longer work. This is why unemployment is always so high in socialist countries. What you have to go through to have employees is just brutal.

But here’s the thing about what Obama said — he has it exactly backwards. The government didn’t build any of that shit he is talking about — we built it. We are the ones who paid for it. Not only did we build our businesses we built the schools and the roads and everything else he thinks was generated out of thin air. If you want to get technical about it the businesses and taxpayers that came along before we did built it all and now we are building what comes next.

And not only that, but we did it with the albatross of a predatory, corrupt and overbearing government hanging around our necks at every juncture.

And now we have had enough.

I haven’t made more than $50k from my business but one or two years of the past 15. But now that it is time to cash out after providing literally hundreds of jobs I get the stink eye and get castigated for being a member of the 1%. Even though I can remember sitting on the edge of the bed and holding my head in my hands wondering what I had done risking everything I had to create a business and wondering how it would all work out when I had just finished working several days in a row with no sleep…

Breitbart post on how Valerie Jarrett runs the government.

During a presentation at the Wall Street Journal’s “CEO Council” in November 2011, Democrat Erskine Bowles placed blame for the failure of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform on a “cabal” of Chicago politicians surrounding President Obama. Bowles said the group convinced Obama to stand aside and let Rep. Paul Ryan lead the way on budget reform in order to gain a political advantage over Republicans.

In November 2011, The Wall Street Journal assembled over 100 CEOs of top companies to hear from political leaders on a range of financial topics. There were dozens of featured speakers from both sides of the aisle including Eric Cantor, Timothy Geithner, Jon Huntsman, Jack Lew, Paul Ryan and both co-chairs of the Simpson Bowles commission. During their presentation, the two men were asked why their recommendations were not adopted or advanced by the President.

Bob Reynolds, Putnam Investments: Your presidential commission delivered your report in December. How surprised were you that your commission gave the president tremendous coverage to do something, and it wasn’t even mentioned in the State of the Union?

Erskine Bowles: If you think you were surprised, you should have looked at us. I negotiated the budget for President Clinton. And every investment banker will tell you the key to success is knowing your client and defining success up front. So, I knew what success was on his part, and I could go in there and negotiate the deal. I did not know President Obama, and neither did Alan. So, we spent a tremendous amount of time with him and his economic team up front defining success. And we negotiated a deal that got a majority of Republicans to vote for it, so he had plenty of cover on the other side. It also exceeded every single one of the goals that he had given us. I fully expected them to grab hold of this. If it had been President Clinton, he would have said, “God, I created this, this is wonderful. It was all my idea.” So we were really surprised.

My belief is that most of the members of the economic team strongly supported it. Like every White House, there’s a small cabal of people that surround the president that he trusts and works with, and I believe it was those Chicago guys, the political team that convinced him that it would be smarter for him to wait and let Paul Ryan go first, and then he would look like the sensible guy in the game. …

John Podhoretz on Todd Akin.

On Sunday, a six-term Congressman from Missouri running as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate went on a newsmaker program and, in defense of his pro-life views, reported that doctors say the body of a woman who has suffered a “legitimate rape” will somehow contrive to prevent a pregnancy: “It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” The moral, intellectual, and spiritual ignoramus who spoke those words is Todd Akin. He won the Missouri primary two weeks ago in a three-way race against two other conservatives, taking 36 percent of the vote—his two major rivals together won about 60 percent. He was supported in his bid by, among others, the Democrats who believed he would be the weakest candidate to face incumbent Claire McCaskill, widely viewed as the most vulnerable incumbent running for Senate this year. They ran ads attacking his rivals and helped him prevail.

Smart move. Akin is likely to join a list of Republican primary winners who have seized defeat from the jaws of victory …

In Contentions, Bethany Mandel says the Akin/Biden flaps highlight the difference between the parties.

This month two prominent politicians have said remarkably stupid things: Vice President Joe Biden warned that Republicans were going to put a largely black crowd “back into chains” and the Republican running for the Missouri Senate said that women who experienced “legitimate rape” could naturally prevent pregnancy. Both statements were incredibly stupid, even for politicians, and were the definition of offensive; but the responses of each party highlights their differences quite clearly. …

How about something important? Cincinnati Reds have a rabbit in the minors who’ll come to the Show in 2014 or maybe late 2013. In the meantime the NY Times says Billy Hamilton’s making waves.

… Tales of Hamilton’s incredible speed are collected and passed around the lower levels of the game the way folks used to tell stories of the great Negro leagues speedster Cool Papa Bell, who was said to be so fast he could hit a grounder through the box and be hit by the ball as he slid into second base.

In Bakersfield, Calif., Hamilton scored on a sacrifice fly — to the second baseman. He also scored from third when the catcher threw to first to complete a strikeout. In high school, Hamilton once made a fine running catch on the warning track. Not so unusual, except he was playing shortstop at the time.

If feats of prodigious strength are considered Bunyonesque, then deeds featuring incredible speed must be considered Hamiltonian.

“He did something every day that made me raise my eyebrows,” said Delino DeShields, the former Montreal Expos speedster who managed Hamilton at Dayton in 2011, when Hamilton stole a mere 103 bases.

When Hamilton strolls languidly to the plate, the whole ballpark takes note. Infielders move in, knowing they will have to hurry throws to get Hamilton on a grounder. Fans sit up straight. Even the broadcasters pay closer attention.

“The phrase I use is ‘heightened sense of awareness,’ ” said the Pensacola radio announcer Tommy Thrall, who has had to adjust to the buzz Hamilton provides with every at-bat.

During a recent inside-the-park homer hit by Hamilton, Thrall looked to second to spot the dashing player, only to find “he was already rounding third.”

Hamilton grew up in Taylorsville, Miss., roughly midway between Jackson and Hattiesburg. A superb all-around athlete, he nearly went to Mississippi State in the Southeastern Conference to play wide receiver, until his mother stepped in.

“That’s her baby, and she had seen those big dudes in the SEC,” said Hamilton, who talks almost as fast as he runs.

The Reds picked Hamilton, who taught himself to switch-hit upon joining the organization, in the second round of the 2009 draft. While he has fulfilled his promise on the basepaths, Hamilton has also been steady at the plate, hitting .303 through Sunday. He is purely a slap hitter at this stage — of his 40 hits with Pensacola, all but nine have been singles — but makes up for it with patience and a good eye at the plate, and his walk totals have added about 100 points to his on-base percentage, which is .406. He is on track to join the major league club by 2014. …

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Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom write on photo-ID laws.

Without a personal identification card issued by some level of government, you are a second-class citizen. You cannot board an airplane, ride an Amtrak train, buy a six-pack of beer or a pack of cigarettes, open a checking account, enter many public and some private office buildings or even attend an NAACP convention without proving that you are who you say you are. You cannot even qualify for means-tested public support programs such as Medicaid without valid identification.

These requirements have provoked strikingly little objection from the American public. No one argues that it is grossly discriminatory to deprive people without picture IDs access to this wide range of places, programs and activities.

But when it comes to voting, that is exactly the argument. The Democratic Party, the attorney general of the United States and a vocal chorus from the civil rights community are waging war on voter photo ID laws enacted recently in 10 states, laws they see as part of a new voter suppression movement.

In their view, measures ostensibly designed to limit the franchise to people who are U.S. citizens and legal residents of the jurisdiction in which they seek to vote have the real purpose of disfranchising poor people in general and especially poor African Americans and Latinos.

The charge leveled against photo ID requirements has a particularly nasty echo: …

John Fund says photo-ID laws have found favor with the public.

… The basic problem that opponents of photo-ID laws have is that the American people reject their view that these laws are a tool of voter suppression. The American people view these laws as common sense. In a time when everyone needs ID to buy Sudafed at a drug store, purchase beer, travel by plane or even train, cash a check, enter a federal building, or apply for welfare benefits or a marriage license, showing ID at the polls doesn’t strike the average person as burdensome.

In a new Washington Post poll, a majority in all but one of 37 demographic groups responded in the affirmative to the following question: “In your view, should voters in the United States be required to show official, government-issued photo identification — such as a driver’s license — when they cast ballots on election day, or shouldn’t they have to do this?” The sole exception among demographic groups was liberal Democrats, who gave the idea 48 percent support.

Among all adults, 74 percent supported photo ID, as did 76 percent of independents and even 60 percent of Democrats. Sixty-five percent of blacks and 64 percent of Hispanics backed requiring ID at the polls. Those who lack a high-school degree — the demographic whose members are probably the most likely not to be able to afford an ID –  registered 76 percent support.

The Post also asked those surveyed if they believed the supporters and opponents of voter-ID laws were acting out of genuine concern for fair elections, or that they were trying to gain some partisan advantage. Respondents were more likely to say that the opponents of these laws had political motivations than to say that proponents did. …

David Harsanyi counters 5 Dem Ryan complaints.

By naming Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan to the Republican presidential ticket, Mitt Romney offered Democrats an opportunity to reject demagoguery and engage in a serious intellectual debate about the future.

Or so says conventional media wisdom. To this point, however, no such luck. The path of least political resistance, it seems, is to scaremonger the electorate with half-truths and outright lies. Mitt Romney might be running on his own budget—though he has embraced many of the components of the Ryan plan—but that hasn’t stopped Democrats.

1.  No, the Ryan budget isn’t extreme

Jim Messina, President Obama’s campaign manager, who, among countless partisans has probably never actually read Ryan’s budgets, calls his plans “radical.”

A common distortion was forwarded by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who not only claims that Ryan’s budget “would kill people, no question,” but that Ryan’s plan would “cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge.” Life under Calvin Coolidge–high growth, low taxation and peace–is nothing to sneeze at, but Ryan’s plan, alas, would only bring non-military discretionary spending back to 2008 levels. It would cut subsidies and federal bureaucracy by 10 percent and reform compensation plans of federal employees. …

Foreign Policy has a piece on the poor living conditions in China’s cities.

… Why are Chinese cities so monolithic? The answer lies in the country’s fractured history. In the 1930s, China was a failed state: Warlords controlled large swaths of territory, and the Japanese had colonized the northeast. Shanghai was a foreign pleasure den, but life expectancy hovered around 30. Tibetans, Uighurs, and other minorities largely governed themselves. When Mao Zedong unified China in 1949, much of the country was in ruins, and his Communist Party rebuilt it under a unifying theme. Besides promulgating a single language and national laws, they subscribed to the Soviet idea of what a city should be like: wide boulevards, oppressively squat, functional buildings, dormitory-style housing. Cities weren’t conceived of as places to live, but as building blocks needed to build a strong and prosperous nation; in other words, they were constructed for the benefit of the party and the country, not the people.

Even today, most Chinese cities feel like they were cobbled together from a Soviet-era engineering textbook. China’s fabled post-Mao liberal reforms meant that the country’s cities grew wealthier, but not that much more distinct from each other. Beijing has changed almost beyond recognition since Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978, but to see what Beijing looked like in the past, visit a less developed part of China: Malls in Xian, a regional hub in central China famous for its row upon row of grimacing terracotta warriors, look like the shabby pink structures that used to dot western Beijing. Yes, China’s cities are booming, but there’s a depressing sameness to what you find in even the newest of new boomtowns. Consider the checklist of “hot” new urban features itemized in a 2007 article in the Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, including obligatory new “development zones” (sprawling corporate parks set up to attract foreign direct investment), public squares, “villa” developments for the nouveau riche, large overlapping highways, and, of course, a new golf course or two for the bosses. The cookie-cutter approach is such that even someone like Zhou Deci, former director of the ChineseAcademy of Urban Planning and Design, told the paper he has difficulty telling Chinese cities apart.

This model of endless fractal Beijings wouldn’t be so bad if the city itself were charming, but it is a dreary expanse traversed by unwalkable highways, punctuated by military bases, government offices, and other closed-off spaces, with undrinkable tap water and poisonous air that’s sometimes visible, in yellow or gray. And so are its lesser copies across the country’s 3.7 million square miles, from Urumqi in the far west to Shenyang way up north. For all their economic success, China’s cities, with their lack of civil society, apocalyptic air pollution, snarling traffic, and suffocating state bureaucracy, are still terrible places to live. …

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Writing for Newsweek, Niall Ferguson says Barack has to go.

Despite having been—full disclosure—an adviser to John McCain, I acknowledged his opponent’s remarkable qualities: his soaring oratory, his cool, hard-to-ruffle temperament, and his near faultless campaign organization.

Yet the question confronting the country nearly four years later is not who was the better candidate four years ago. It is whether the winner has delivered on his promises. And the sad truth is that he has not.

In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.

In an unguarded moment earlier this year, the president commented that the private sector of the economy was “doing fine.” Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.

In his fiscal year 2010 budget—the first he presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year.

Unemployment was supposed to be 6 percent by now. It has averaged 8.2 percent this year so far. Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.

Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits. …

… I first met Paul Ryan in April 2010. I had been invited to a dinner in Washington where the U.S. fiscal crisis was going to be the topic of discussion. So crucial did this subject seem to me that I expected the dinner to happen in one of the city’s biggest hotel ballrooms. It was actually held in the host’s home. Three congressmen showed up—a sign of how successful the president’s fiscal version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (about the debt) had been. Ryan blew me away. I have wanted to see him in the White House ever since.

It remains to be seen if the American public is ready to embrace the radical overhaul of the nation’s finances that Ryan proposes. The public mood is deeply ambivalent. The president’s approval rating is down to 49 percent. The Gallup Economic Confidence Index is at minus 28 (down from minus 13 in May). But Obama is still narrowly ahead of Romney in the polls as far as the popular vote is concerned (50.8 to 48.2) and comfortably ahead in the Electoral College. The pollsters say that Paul Ryan’s nomination is not a game changer; indeed, he is a high-risk choice for Romney because so many people feel nervous about the reforms Ryan proposes.

But one thing is clear. Ryan psychs Obama out. This has been apparent ever since the White House went on the offensive against Ryan in the spring of last year. And the reason he psychs him out is that, unlike Obama, Ryan has a plan—as opposed to a narrative—for this country.

Mitt Romney is not the best candidate for the presidency I can imagine. But he was clearly the best of the Republican contenders for the nomination. He brings to the presidency precisely the kind of experience—both in the business world and in executive office—that Barack Obama manifestly lacked four years ago. (If only Obama had worked at Bain Capital for a few years, instead of as a community organizer in Chicago, he might understand exactly why the private sector is not “doing fine” right now.) And by picking Ryan as his running mate, Romney has given the first real sign that—unlike Obama—he is a courageous leader who will not duck the challenges America faces.

The voters now face a stark choice. They can let Barack Obama’s rambling, solipsistic narrative continue until they find themselves living in some American version of Europe, with low growth, high unemployment, even higher debt—and real geopolitical decline.

Or they can opt for real change: the kind of change that will end four years of economic underperformance, stop the terrifying accumulation of debt, and reestablish a secure fiscal foundation for American national security.

I’ve said it before: it’s a choice between les États Unis and the Republic of the Battle Hymn.

I was a good loser four years ago. But this year, fired up by the rise of Ryan, I want badly to win.

Charles Krauthammer says Romney’s Ryan pick has charted the course of the GOP for decades.

… And while Romney is the present, Ryan is the future. Romney’s fate will be determined on Nov. 6. Ryan’s presence, assuming he acquits himself well in the campaign, will extend for decades.

Ryan’s importance is enhanced by his identity as a movement conservative. Reagan was the first movement leader in modern times to achieve the presidency. Like him, Ryan represents a new kind of conservatism for his time.

Reagan rejected the moderate accommodationism represented by Gerald Ford, the sitting president Reagan nearly overthrew in 1976. Ryan represents a new constitutional conservatism of limited government and individual opportunity that carried Republicans to victory in 2010, not just as a rejection of Obama’s big-government hyper-liberalism but also as a significant departure from the philosophically undisciplined, idiosyncratically free-spending “compassionate conservatism” of Obama’s Republican predecessor.

Ryan’s role is to make the case for a serious approach to structural problems — a hardheaded, sober-hearted conservatism that puts to shame a reactionary liberalism that, with Greece in our future, offers handouts, bromides and a 4.6 percent increase in tax rates.

If Ryan does it well, win or lose in 2012, he becomes a dominant national force. Mild and moderate Mitt Romney will have shaped the conservative future for years to come.

The cunning of history. Or if you prefer, its sheer capriciousness.

Steve Hayward says the Dems are losing it again.

One way in which this election is starting to resemble the 1980 election is that Democrats are starting to lose their grip and lash out in ways that even the mainstream media find over the top—like TV ads calling Romney a murderer, or Slow Joe Biden letting fly with the maxed-out race card.  Today one of MSNBC’s commentators, Toure (I guess he doesn’t have a first name?) charged Romney with the “niggerization” of Obama.  Not even Ron Burgundy could say “stay classy liberals” with a straight face at this point.

In the 1980 election, Jimmy Carter’s wild charges that Ronald Reagan was a racist backfired badly on him, and propelled the media to start writing about Carter’s “meanness” factor (which had been there all along to anyone who followed Carter’s Georgia career closely).

A few samples from a certain great book (that everyone needs to have on their bookshelf):

The liberal columnist Richard Reeves wrote: “The Carter campaign is as mean-spirited as any you’ll see in American politics.  Where this meanness comes from is obvious to anyone who has watched Carter’s rise to the Presidency and the attempts to keep him there—it comes from the top, from Jimmy Carter.”  …

David Harsanyi on why the GOP might win the Medicare debate. 

You can crunch the numbers all day long, but in politics it’s perception that matters.

And though it’s still early, Republicans have a chance to turn the Medicare debate into a political advantage (or a wash,  which is as good as a win). The conventional thinking, the media thinking, and actually, the thinking (if we’re to believe Politico) of the entire hand-wringing GOP establishment, was that Paul Ryan’s vice presidential candidacy would make Medicare an issue and surely sink the ticket. Democrats, we were told in story after story, were just giddy over the prospect of facing the Wisconsin congressman.

The debate hasn’t exactly evolved the way we were told it should. Why?

One: It’s possible that voters have already priced-in the hysterical warnings from liberals about the GOP’s intent to destroy all entitlements. They’ve heard it all a million times, yet the programs’ price tag continue to grow exponentially, and often under Republican rule. Add to that increasing numbers of Americans who believe that Medicare is unsustainable and the issue has probably lost some potency for Democrats.

Two: …

Andrew Malcolm says the prez had a rocky trip in Iowa.

President Obama was back in Iowa for several days this past week. He has winning memories there. But the fact that an incumbent president feels it necessary to invest three of only 79 precious remaining days there says how close the presidential race now is.

Obama’s experienced advance team had a bunch of flubs. That farm family with all the windmills that President Quixote loves to laud turns out to be Republicans and informed reporters after Obama’s visit that he sure wasn’t getting their votes this time.

There was the state fair beer tent where Obama bought a round of Bud Lights for everyone, except the guy with the Mitt Romney sign. Great summertime photo op. Except it turns out the Secret Service closed down the guy’s tent long before Obama’s arrival and the small business owner lost thousands in sales.

Then there was the caterer who wore a “Government Didn’t Build My Business” T-shirt to work the president’s event. Our friend Tom Bevan at the must-read RealClearPolitics has all the details here.

But the moment that sticks out in our mind was something that didn’t happen during the president’s Iowa trip. …

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Noemie Emery says with their record of prognostication, it is a good sign the Dems are pleased with the Ryan pick.

Liberal pundits, liberals, the Obama machine and Obama himself all call Paul Ryan a disastrous pick for vice president. That looks like a good sign for the Mitt Romney ticket, given the multiple records Team Obama has set since 2009 for making bad forecasts, losing elections and in general getting things wrong.

They said Obama was a transformational leader who was about to ring in the next great liberal era; that the conservative movement was dead for the next quarter-century; and that the Democratic majority, “emerging” since the late 1990s, was now finally being born. They said a crisis was a bad thing to waste, and instead they got wasted. They said a crisis would make people turn to the state, but they turned against it. They said the stimulus would keep unemployment under 8 percent and voters would love it. Unemployment has been above 8 percent for 40-plus months in succession, and voters did not.

They said people would come to love health care (they didn’t), and that people wouldn’t resent or remember the way that they’d passed it (they did). They said the Tea Party was “Astroturf,” “racist” and would destroy the Republican Party. But it was authentic; it embraced and elected blacks, Hispanics and women; it gave the GOP a bumper crop of magnetic new leaders and led it to a succession of wins.

Meanwhile, Obama lost both his touch and his bearings, and every campaign he came near. He couldn’t sell the stimulus or health care to voters. He campaigned for Creigh Deeds (blown away by Bob McDonnell), for Jon Corzine (blown away by Chris Christie) and for Martha Coakley (blown away by Scott Brown.) His party was blown away in the 2010 midterms, losing the House and many statehouses, whose occupants began turning right. …

Roger Simon says this was the week of the dumb Democrat.

This is the week when Democrats have sounded dumb — or hard of hearing.

I’m not just talking about Joe Biden, who always seems that way, or Maureen Dowd, who yesterday opined Paul Ryan was the smiliest (read: most attractive) politician to be so “cruel.” We can put that down to projection on the part of Ms. Dowd, who has made her living for the better part of thirty years now by being cruel to as many people as possible.

No, I’m talking about Democrats in general who are doing their best to misunderstand everything Paul Ryan says or has said, so that they don’t have to acknowledge that he might make sense (or that he had a Democratic co-sponsor for his budget plan they continually excoriate as “radical” without delineating what it is). That way they also don’t have to admit that they don’t have a plan of their own to deal with the imminent entitlement collapse or anything else budgetary for that matter and that their ideology is in such a rapid decline that no one publicly supports it any more. …

Ed Morrissey says Romney’s Ryan bet has already paid off.

When Mitt Romney announced that Rep. Paul Ryan, the sometimes-controversial chair of the House Budget Committee would be his running mate, the media reaction was one of surprise.  Most gave Romney credit for boldness, which by itself contrasted with the received wisdom of Romney as a conservative-in-strategy, risk-averse politician.  The New York Daily News, not exactly known for its conservative point of view, called the selection a “boldly clarifying jolt,” while Bloomberg’s editors  praised Romney for “audacity.”  Both newspapers in Tampa, Florida, where Republicans will hold their convention and in the state where the election may well be decided, called the choice of Ryan “surprisingly bold” and “a powerful statement.”

That’s not to say that the media failed to notice the risks of being “bold.”  Most of the analysis focused on how Romney had put at risk swing states like Florida and Ohio by choosing a man best known for his plan to reform entitlement programs, which would scare seniors away from the Republican ticket.  Others wondered why Romney would risk distracting attention from jobs and the economy to make Medicare – a reliable Democratic issue – the main focus of the election.  Surely this would allow Barack Obama to take the high road, analysts concluded, and engage in a fight over the very vision of the American system of government, a fight Romney would almost certainly lose.

In other words, Romney took a big gamble with Ryan in two ways – in betting that Obama wouldn’t take the challenge for a substantive debate, and that voters will know the difference.  A few days later, it’s clear that Romney won the first bet, and is at least ahead on the second. …

Yuval Levin says Obamacare has changed everything.

… President Obama has put Democrats in the position of being the party that seeks to cut current seniors’ benefits (especially those in Medicare Advantage) and access to care (thanks to the IPAB) while still allowing the program to collapse in the coming years and so watching the deficit explode and bringing on fiscal disaster. And Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have put the Republicans in the position of being the party that wants to protect current seniors’ benefits and make them available to future seniors while still saving the program from collapse in the coming years and so dramatically reducing the deficit and averting fiscal disaster.

Whether you’re now a senior and concerned about your health coverage, are younger and worry if you’ll have affordable coverage when you retire, or are most concerned about the nation’s fiscal health and economic future, the Democrats offer you a very bad deal on Medicare and the Republicans offer you a good one.

The Democrats still don’t see that, and think that turning to Medicare in the wake of Ryan’s selection will yield great political rewards. Perhaps Romney and Ryan should inform them of how the two parties actually stand on the issue. And they might think about informing some voters as well.

CBS affiliate in Roanoke tells us about the bakery owner who told the Vice President to take a hike.

Would you say no to the Vice President?

One New RiverValley business owner turned Vice President Joe Biden down. To see video of the story, click here.

This might happen more than you think from both political parties, most businesses just don’t talk about it. The owner of “Crumb and Get It” – did.

Chris McMurray’s bakery has been open only since May, barely three months.

Wednesday morning, advance teams for Vice President Joe Biden walked in. …

The Secret Service liked what they heard about the bakery.

Secret Service officers associated with Vice President Joe Biden bought a pile of cupcakes from the baker who refused to host Biden at his shop — and they did so out of gratitude.

It’s a startling news nugget at the bottom of a local report. “[S]hortly after Crumb and Get It told Biden’s advance people ‘no’ — the secret service walked in and told [owner] Chris McMurray ”Thanks for standing up and saying ‘no’ — then they bought a whole bunch of cookies and cupcakes,” according to the Valley Reporter (Va.).

McMurray refused to host the Biden entourage as a protest of Obama’s comment, made in the nearby town of Roanoke, that “if you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.”

The Secret Service’s purchase proved to be a herald of things to come, as Virginia locals rewarded McMurray with a rush of business this morning. The bakery ran out of food by 1:15 pm.

The Roanoke Times summed it up.

… Gary Harris, a Vietnam War veteran and commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 776 who lives in Radford, said he picked up some “freedom cookies” to support Crumb and Get It. Like Moore, it was his first visit to the bakery.

“He spoke up for what he believed in,” Harris said. “I heard somewhere that it may help or hurt his business. He shouldn’t be penalized for speaking his opinion, I’m going to help him out all I can.”

Ron Witt, an insurance agent from Pearisburg, said, “I saw the story on television and I thought, I have to stop by and support these people … It’s not political at all. It’s more a matter of principle. He just stood up for himself. It doesn’t have anything to do with the current administration or politics, at least for me.”

Eddie Boes of Blacksburg got the last batch of cookies before Crumb and Get It ran out of dough. Like Witt, Boes said he wanted to support a local businessman’s right to speak his mind.

“It’s a matter of not being afraid of the pressure,” Boes said. “A lot of people aren’t going to say what they think because they’re worried about retribution.”

But Boes said that because McMurray took a stand for his beliefs, he’s being rewarded with much more support from customers than he would have if he’d agreed to play host to Biden for a photo opportunity.