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John Fund says Joe Biden shows the White House has a tiger by the tail.

… The White House has to worry that for the next 82 days Joe Biden will be under tremendous scrutiny — especially given the fact that Paul Ryan has become such a media-attention magnet. Everyone is anticipating the October 11 debate between Biden and Ryan. Biden’s penchant for off-the-cuff remarks doesn’t inspire confidence that he won’t unintentionally blurt something out when facing Ryan. For example, he embarrassed the Obama administration recently by prematurely revealing he was “comfortable” with gay marriage — forcing his boss to suddenly endorse gay marriage on a timetable not of his choosing.

Biden’s erratic statements certainly should make Team Obama nervous. I’ve no doubt that some Democratic strategists would love for Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to swap jobs and bolster the Democratic ticket with a little Clinton magic. But there’s no evidence that Hillary would take that deal. If she wants to run, she is already the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic nomination and would gain no advantage by being yoked to Obama, her old adversary, for the next three months if they lost or the next four years if they won.

So Democrats are stuck with Old Joe, who will turn 70 this November. It’s said that few people vote for a presidential ticket based on who is filling the No. 2 slot. But some do, and they may matter in a very close race. It’s likely that by the time this campaign ends, a lot of people will be more nervous about Joe Biden being a heartbeat away from the presidency than about Paul Ryan.

Joe Biden was the subject of Doug Wilder’s appearance on Neil Cavuto. Daily Caller has the story.

On the Wednesday broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” former Democratic Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder told Vice President Joe Biden: “Slavery is nothing to joke about.”

Wilder, who was the first black American governor since Reconstruction, referred to Biden’s remarks on Tuesday from Danville, Va., calling the rhetoric divisive.

“Well, first of all it is divisive and certainly uncalled for,” Wilder said. “I don’t think the Obama administration needs that at this time. And, as you know, I have not been the most strong supporter of Joe Biden. And yet, we all know he’s gaffe-prone. But when you make a statement that says ‘They are going to put y’all back in chains,’ which means ‘I’m OK — not going to happen to me.’” …

Clive Crook in a column on the Ryan selection put Biden in his place. The rest of the column was not that good and is not included here since we’re respectful of your time.

… So the risk in having a veep-to-be who makes a big impression, good or bad, is mostly on the downside. That’s why it’s traditional to look for a Joe Biden. …

John Kass sees the bigger Biden picture.

… Should Hillary Clinton come to Obama’s rescue? Why should she? When she and Obama faced off for the 2008 presidential nomination, Clinton and her husband, the former president, had the race card played against them by Team Obama. Bill had dared to suggest that Obama’s Democratic primary victory in South Carolina was similar to past victories there by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. For daring to state the obvious, the Clintons were savaged. Bill Clinton said it was Obama’s campaign that injected the race issue.

“I think that they played the race card on me,” a still furious Clinton said in a radio interview after the campaign was over. “And we now know, from memos from the campaign and everything, that they planned to do it all along. I was stating a fact, and it’s still a fact.”

For all his vulgarity and faux-preacher dialect and smarmy pol tricks in Virginia, Biden showed the American people what they can expect from the Obama campaign in the months ahead. And he distilled the Obama re-election effort down to its basic elements:

Class war and race.

Y’all.

Good column from Debra Saunders on the Ryan pick.

… Last year, Newt Gingrich dismissed the Ryan plan as “right-wing social engineering,” then took back his words. Romney said he was “on the same page” as Ryan from the start. That’s not exactly a profile in courage, but in this weak-kneed political climate, it passes for fiscal responsibility.

Biden described the Ryan pick as giving “definition to the vague commitments Romney has made.” I think he’s right.

We know how Romney won the GOP primary game. He was disciplined. He was skilled. He was better than bumbling opponents. He wooed the base with his mantra of tax cuts, tax cuts and more tax cuts.

The general election is a tougher contest. Obama and Biden are pros at promising something for nothing. They’ve convinced their base that the federal government can keep growing, and in a fiscally responsible way, if only Republicans would let them tax the top 2 percent of income earners just a little bit more.

Romney can’t beat the Democratic ticket at that game, but he can beat them by being the adult in the room. In picking the spending-cut-minded Ryan as his running mate, Romney has become more credible.

Thomas Sowell on the choice for voters.

… This election is a test, not just of the opposing candidates but of the voting public. If what they want are the hard facts about where the country is, and where it is heading, they cannot vote for more of the same for the next four years.

But, if what they want is emotionally satisfying rhetoric and a promise to give them something for nothing, to be paid for by taxing somebody else, then Obama is their man. This is not to say that the public will in fact get something for nothing or that rich people will just pay higher taxes, when it is easy for them to escape taxation by investing overseas — creating jobs overseas.

Even if most Americans do not have their own taxes raised, that means little, if they end up paying other people’s taxes in the higher prices of goods and services that pass along the higher taxes imposed on businesses.

There are no doubt voters who will vote on the basis of believing that Obama “cares” more about them. But that is a faith which passeth all understanding. The political mirage of something for nothing, from leaders who “care,” has ruined many a nation.

Kimberley Strassel on the VP pick. 

Mitt Romney did much more this weekend than announce a running mate. He unveiled a significant change in strategy. The 2012 election is now a choice, not just a referendum.

Conservatives have spent much of this summer reassuring themselves. They’ve pointed out the extraordinary sums President Obama has thrown at crippling Mr. Romney. They’ve noted how ugly and brutal those attacks have been. They’ve comforted themselves that, for all the smears, Mr. Romney is within a few points of the incumbent in national tracking polls.

Yet the same can be said on the other side. The economy is teetering, the deficit exploding, the nation unhappy with his signature legislation. Daily, Mr. Romney beats the White House with these failures. But he has barely moved the polling dial.

Mr. Romney’s choice of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, one of the party’s star reformers, is an attempt to break out of the stalemate, change the dynamic. It was foremost a shrewd acknowledgment on Mr. Romney’s part that his path to the White House is going to take more than pointing out the obvious. He needs to run on bold ideas, as Mr. Ryan has, and convince Americans those ideas are the way to prosperity. …

Fred Barnes on the Medicare trap set by the GOP.

President Obama and the Democrats have been ambushed. They blindly walked into the political trap Republicans set for them on Medicare.

Democratic strategists were certain that, with Paul Ryan on the Republican ticket, Medicare had become a better issue than ever for them. How do we know this? Democrats said so.

Ryan is the author of a Medicare reform plan that Democrats insist would “end Medicare as we know it.” That’s their mantra. Mitt Romney, who picked Ryan as his vice presidential running mate last week, has a similar plan of his own.

It didn’t occur to Democrats that Republicans might have devised, tested, and were ready to deliver a response that would put Democrats on the defensive. It’s a double whammy in which Obama and Democrats are held responsible for cutting Medicare spending and using the money to pay for the president’s unpopular health care plan, Obamacare.

Moving quickly, the Romney campaign packaged that two-step response into a crisp, 30-second TV ad that began being aired yesterday.  The campaign plans a large buy with the ad, particularly in swing states. …

Bret Stephens paid attention to one of Paul Ryan’s speeches on foreign policy.

… Most foreign-policy speeches by American politicians take the form of untidy piles of verities and clichés. Here, for example, is Barack Obama on China: “As we look to the future, what’s needed, I believe, is a spirit of cooperation that is also friendly competition.” Here he is on the U.N.: “The United Nations can either be a place where we bicker about outdated differences or forge common ground.” Here he is to the British Parliament: “The time for our leadership is now.”

Mr. Ryan doesn’t have the president’s reputation for eloquence. Nor do his speeches ride on the windy drafts of “Yes We Can.” But unlike Mr. Obama, his speeches communicate ideas and arguments, not pieties and emotions.

Thus this speech begins not with a cliché but with a contention: “Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course.” It proceeds, briefly, to demonstrate the point quantitatively: Defense spending in 1970 consumed 39% of the federal budget but takes only 16% today. In the proverbial guns-to-butter ratio, our veins are already clogged.

Next there is history. Why can’t the U.S. simply cede the cumbersome role of world policeman to somebody else? Didn’t Britain do as much in the 1940s? It did. Yet, “unlike Britain, which handed leadership to a power that shared its fundamental values, today’s most dynamic and growing powers do not embrace basic principles that should be at the core of the international system.”

That’s not a novel insight, exactly, but it’s something that needs to be said and is said only rarely. Similarly with Mr. Ryan’s next point: American exceptionalism isn’t a type of jingoism. Instead, it derives from the fact that it was the first nation born of an idea, and from an idea that is true not only for Americans. “America’s foundations,” he says, “are not our own—they belong equally to every person everywhere.” …

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Rare liberal media kudos for Romney. This from Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal.

Watching Mitt Romney on the campaign trail this weekend after he tapped Paul Ryan as his running mate, it was hard not to be struck by how significantly the candidate’s message and delivery improved.   Romney was newly energized, almost sounding like an evangelist preacher as he preached the merits of capitalism and the free market.   His rhetoric was sharp and specific as he contrasted his policy vision with that of President Obama’s.  With Ryan, he looked confident in his sit-down interview with CBS’ Bob Schieffer.  It was as if the ghost of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie entered the cautious, often-awkward pol’s body, to great effect.   (Indeed, like Christie, he even challenged a heckler at last night’s event in Waukesha County, Wisconsin.)

This is the type of change that’s very tough to measure in even the best polls and focus groups.  Romney overruled his top consultants in picking Ryan; they wanted him to go with a more cautious choice, like Tim Pawlenty.  But Romney clearly felt a kinship with the younger Ryan, and the chemistry was undeniable on their first couple of days on the campaign trail.  Romney felt unshackled, and felt free to play to his biggest political asset — a fiscal conservatism that’s been the one consistent hallmark of his career, from working at Bain Capital to the Salt Lake City Olympics to his tenure as governor of Massachusetts. …

… Even Christie, known as the blunt political truth-teller to his fans in New Jersey, was a much more cautious pol when he ran against Gov. Jon Corzine in 2009.  Indeed, his campaign was rapped for not offering specific plans, resorting to anti-incumbent generalities.  It wasn’t until he was elected that he developed his persona as a straight-talking reformer.   In a sense, Romney is one-upping Christie, and placing the even riskier bet that calling for major changes is a political winner in the middle of a heated presidential race.  High-risk, high-reward, indeed.

Mark Steyn on the money wasted by Barack Obama.

… There are no precedents in history for a great power spending itself to death on the scale America is doing. Obama has added $5 trillion to the national debt, and has nothing to show for it. Do you know how difficult that is to do? Personal debt per citizen is currently about 50 grand, but at least you got a La-Z-Boy recliner and a gas-fired barbecue out of it. Obama has spent America’s future, and left no more trace than if he and his high school “choom gang” had wheeled a barrow of five trillion in large notes behind the gym and used them for rolling paper. Right now, combined total debt in the United States is just shy of $700,000 per family. Add in the so-called “unfunded liabilities” that a normal American business would have to include in its SEC filings but from which U.S. Government accounting conveniently absolves itself, and you’re talking about a debt burden per family of about a million bucks. In other words, look around you: the paved roads, the landscaped shopping mall, the Starbucks and the juice bar and the mountain bike store. … There’s nothing holding the joint up.

Hmm. “There’s nothing holding the joint up. Steyn 2012″: How’s that poll with the focus groups? Not exactly “Morning in America,” is it? But what happens when you blithely ignore debt for a few decades? Here’s a headline from The Wall Street Journal’s “Smart Money” this very week: “More retirees are falling behind on student debt, and Uncle Sam is coming after their benefits.” Maybe that’s the slogan. “It’s twilight in America: More retirees are falling behind on student debt.”

Half the country is entirely unaware of the existential threat Obama-sized government represents, and Mitt seems in no hurry to alert them to what’s at stake, save for occasional warnings that if we’re not careful America will end up like Europe. We should be so lucky. The more-likely scenario is something closer to the more corrupt and decrepit fiefdoms of Latin America. Look at the underlying assumptions of the Mitt-gives-you-cancer ad – that in America a businessman is somehow responsible not only for his employee’s health, but that of the employee’s family members years after said employee has left said employ. No Euro-socialist would even understand the basis of the attack: In its assumptions about the ever-more-tortuous and farther-flung burdens the state can place upon private business, it is quintessentially American.

This election represents the last exit ramp before the death spiral. …Obama has spent the past four years making things worse. More debt, more dependency, more delusion. For Act Two, he’s now touting the auto bailout as a model for … everything! “I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.” In the past three years, he has “created” 2.6 million new jobs – a number that does not even keep up with the number of (legal) immigrants who arrive each month. Obama does not “create” jobs, he creates disabled people: In the same period as 2.6 million Americans signed on with new employers, 3.1 million signed on at the Social Security Disability Office. Obama is the first president in history to create more disabled people than workers. He is the biggest creator of disabled people on the planet. He has disabled more people than the Japanese tsunami. More Americans have been disabled by Obama than have been given cancer by Mitt Romney. …

 

Andrew Malcolm reports on the president’s call upon the successful Mars landing.

Don’t you hate it when you get word from the White House that the president of the United States is going to call you shortly for a ceremonial conversation? So, you gather your entire science team in a room for the call on a speaker-phone?

And the phone rings? And it’s actually him, the big guy himself calling on his secure presidential phone aboard Air Force One on another campaign trip?

And he doesn’t have a clue who he’s talking with?

D’oh!

Obama’s been getting some deservedly bad press recently about his gutting of the American space program and its pioneering missions. Thousands of skilled space workers laid off in Florida, as in the crucial swing state of Florida. Space shuttle retirements. Nothing to replace them. Astronaut resignations. China’s ambitious space plans. Americans forced to rent seats on Russian rockets.

Last week, NASA and the skilled team at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab scored an amazing success, smoothly landing the largest, most complex robot rover ever on another planet.

Curiosity’s eight-month, 354 million mile journey had nothing to do with Obama. In fact, it’s been under construction for eight years. Which is to say it started under some previous president, who gets all the blame for bad things and none of the credit for successes. And Curiosity’s achievement was no exception. That would have taken grace. …

If you remember, August 2nd Pickings was dedicated to Milton Friedman. James Pethokoukis has a post that illustrates his wisdom. It concerns the failure of Obama’s stimulus package. A failure forseen by Friedman’s 1957 hypothesis that people’s consumption is controlled by their income expectations, not by how money is jiggling around in their pockets.

Embedded in the Obama stimulus plan was this idea: Give people a temporary increase in their income and they will spend that money — at least some of it — boosting the economy. But as many predicted, the temporary tax cuts didn’t provide much bank for the buck.

The reason those results are not surprising — at least to those familiar with the work of Milton Friedman — is that people’s consumption derives from their expectation’s of their permanent income. From the Library of Economics and Liberty:

 Keynesian economists once believed that tax cuts boost disposable income and thus cause people to consume more. But according to the permanent income model, temporary tax cuts have much less of an effect on consumption than Keynesians had thought. The reason is that people are basing their consumption decision on their wealth, not their current disposable income. Because temporary tax cuts are bound to be reversed, they have little or no effect on wealth, and therefore have little or no effect on consumption. Thus, the permanent income model had the effect of diminishing the expenditure “multiplier” that economists ascribed to temporary tax cuts.

Or as a new study from the St. Louis Fed puts it, ” … consumption should be weakly related to current income but strongly related to the discounted present value of the income that households expect to earn.” …

John Fund makes some good points about Olympian political correctness.

The London Olympics features 302 events. But this year there clearly is a new category: racial sensitivity. These Olympic Games are rife with examples of people taking offense, and it’s time to discuss some guardrails and guidelines before political correctness takes over completely.

First, some behavior on the part of athletes is clearly out of bounds. After Swiss footballer Michel Morganella’s team lost to South Korea, he said on Twitter that his opponents could “go burn” and were a “bunch of mongoloids.” That’s hardly sporting behavior, and he was sent home for insulting the dignity of the Korean team. Beyond that, it was just offensive speech.

And sometimes it’s the critics who are clearly out of line. NBC was deluged with criticism because it ran an ad that offended fans of gold-medal-winning U.S. gymnast Gabby Douglas, who is black. NBC commentator Bob Costas had just finished a commentary in which he said that “much of America has fallen in love with Gabby Douglas” when a gymnastics-themed commercial appeared promoting NBC’s comedy Animal Practice. It featured a small, grinning monkey doing gymnastic tricks.

Because African Americans have sometimes been compared to simians by people trying to dehumanize them, many viewers complained the ad was racist. NBC responded with an apology and an explanation that the ad was placed in the lineup of commercials long before Douglas won her medal. That should end that story.

Then there are the cases in the middle. …

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Fareed Zakaria was lucky with the timing of the Ryan pick, but Pickerhead will not miss reminding readers of what a fraud he has become. Allahpundit does the honors for Hot Air.

Cam Edwards and Newsbusters caught him in the act; follow the link to read the offending passage from his new gun-control column side by side with a similar paragraph in a gun-control piece published in April by “The New Yorker.” Not the first time that Zakaria’s been accused of pinching stuff, either. The Atlantic remembers that Jeffrey Goldberg accused him of lifting quotes from Goldberg’s own interviews with Israeli officials. And just this afternoon, Michael Moynihan — who caught The New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer making up Bob Dylan quotes just two weeks ago — noticed that a sentence in Zakaria’s column on China in the May edition of Time reads a lot like a sentence from a Time story on China published in 1968. If he were a lesser name, he’d probably already have been canned. As it is, I wonder how many lucky Time staffers will end up on the inevitable task force charged with going through his old stuff to see just how bad the problem is. …

Jim Sleeper from HuffPo has more.

A few hours ago Fareed Zakaria apologized publicly for passing off New Yorker writer Jill Lepore’s work as his own in an essay he wrote for Time magazine. Not to put too fine a point on it, Zakaria committed egregious plagiarism, as Alexander Abad-Santos of the Atlantic Wire reported.

But the offense does not end there. Zakaria is a trustee of Yale, which takes a very dim view of plagiarism and suspends or expels students who commit anything like what he has committed here. If the Yale Corporation were to apply to itself the standards it expects its faculty and students to meet, Zakaria would have to take a leave or resign.

Worse still: Lepore, whom Zakaria wronged by misappropriating her work, is herself a Yale PhD. If anyone knows what it means to steal another scholar’s work, it’s Zakaria, who holds a PhD from Harvard.

Zakaria is a busy man, of course. Although he’s been judged by The New Republic to be one of America’s “most-overrated thinkers,” …

Michael Rubin wonders when Yale will set Fareed free by kicking him off the board.

There is now little question that Fareed Zakaria is guilty of plagiarism. He has admitted copying a portion of a New Yorker essay and apologized. Time, where Zakaria works as a columnist, has suspended Zakaria for a month, and CNN—owned by the same parent company—has suspended him pending an investigation. This represents a mere slap on the wrist for someone whose standard speaking fee is $75,000.

As YaleUniversity lecturer Jim Sleeper notes, however, Zakaria has a perch not only at CNN and Time, but also at Yale University, where he sits on the Yale Corporation, the University’s governing board and policy-making body. There is no greater academic sin than plagiarism. Students can be expelled for plagiarizing papers, and professors can be fired. To let Zakaria off the hook on his own recognizance would be to eviscerate the principle of academic integrity for which Yale says it stands.

Whether Yale President Richard Levin will do the right thing, however, is another issue. While Levin has distinguished himself as a master fundraiser, he has also shown a disturbing willingness to undercut free speech (ironically, with Zakaria’s acquiescence), compromise academic integrity to foreign interests, and embrace fame over principle. Seldom is an issue as cut-and-dry as Zakaria’s plagiarism. Unless Yale seeks to demonstrate that cheating is acceptable and that there is no principle to which it will not turn a blind eye, then it really has no choice: It is time to give Zakaria the boot.

Erskine Bowles is the Dems go-to-guy for deficit reduction. Obama picked him to be the Dem co-chair of the deficit commission that the president ignored. Ed Morrissey has a great video of Bowles praising Paul Ryan and his budget.

Why is this important?  Erskine Bowles has a long pedigree as a Democratic budget thinker — and presidential adviser.  When Barack Obama needed to pick the co-chair for his deficit committee, which he roundly ignored in the end, he chose Bowles to represent his side on the panel.  Bowles served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and earlier ran the Small Business Administration for Clinton.  Ezra Klein predicted on Friday that Bowles would be the front-runner for Tim Geithner’s job at Treasury if Obama wins a second term. …

“Have any of you met Paul Ryan? We should get him to come to the university. I’m telling you this guy is amazing, uh. I always thought that I was OK with arithmetic, but this guy can run circles around me. And, he is honest. He is straightforward. He is sincere.

And, the budget that he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit by $4 trillion…just like we did.

The President came out with his own plan and the President came out, as you will remember, with a budget and I don’t think anyone took that budget very seriously. Um, the Senate voted against it 97 to nothing. …

Roger Simon likes Paul Ryan as much as Erskine Bowles does.

Mitt Romney did something that a lot of supposed wise men said he wouldn’t — pick a vice presidential candidate who is more charismatic than he. In choosing Paul Ryan, Romney took the risk he would be outshone, but he did America a favor. He selected the brightest young politician we have.

He also underscored his best line of the campaign so far, “It’s the economy – and we’re not stupid!” No one in Congress has thought more creatively or acted with more determination to solve the great economic problems we face than Ryan. He has virtually stood alone among higher elected officials in the battle for serious entitlement reform, being criticized by none other than Newt Gingrich for recommending remedies that were, if anything, too mild for the monumental fiscal crisis confronting us. But at least Ryan has tried to do something about it. Few others have had the courage to attempt it.

Through nominating Ryan, Romney has signaled that his campaign is going to be about the economy, the economy, and, yes, you guessed it, the economy (with healthcare thrown in as an aspect of the economy). It is not going to be about immigration, marriage, the legalization of marijuana, whether candidates cause cancer, who has a dog on his car, or even who was born where. It’s going to be about the one thing America is obsessed with, the one thing that if we don’t correct nothing else is possible…. Okay, I won’t say it again, but you certainly know. …

Toby Harnden agrees with Erskine Bowles too, and lists 10 reasons why Ryan could help Romney.

1. The image of Romney as a safety-first campaigner hoping to win the presidency by default as voters turfed out Barack Obama will now disappear. The Ryan pick indicates Romney is prepared to take a calculated risk and be decisive. He’s going big, rather than small. At a time when the US faces huge problems, that could be a major advantage.

2. Fears of the Republican base not turning out for Romney will now evaporate. In terms of unifying Establishment conservatives and grassroots activists, Ryan is a winner.

3. Ryan undoubtedly aspires to be president but at 42 he knows time is on his side. He quickly developed a good rapport with Romney – I saw the two of them together in Milwaukee, Wisconsin back in March when Romney clinched the nomination. There is every chance they’ll complement each other well and Ryan will be an assiduously loyal wing man. …

Jennifer Rubin likes the 10 ways the Ryan pick annoys the media.

The selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as Mitt Romney’s running mate blows up a bunch of phony story lines the media have been peddling.

1. “Romney has no ideas.” Actually, he and Ryan have the new policy ideas. Tons of them. If you doubt it, wait for the vice-presidential debate.

2. “Romney is excessively cautious.” Tim Pawlenty would have been the cautious pick. Ryan is young and vibrant and stands ready to battle for conservative ideas.

3. “The media are really important.” If Romney thought the mainstream media were critical, he’d duck the Mediscare fight. The pick is one that reflects confidence in the conservative agenda. …

Senator Blutarsky Blog says the administration’s admitted costs of the GM bailout are just the start.

Via Instapundit, the Treasury Department now estimates taxpayers’ losses on the auto bailout at $25 billion. This figure, however, relies on some optimistic assumptions; the reality is likely to be far worse.

One optimistic assumption is noted by the Detroit News in the linked article: GM’s stock price. The $25 billion figure (equal to 46.7 solyndras) is based on GM’s closing price at the end of May, $22.20. However, the stock has continued to decline through the Summer and despite rallying off its late July lows, the stock now stands at $20.47, at which price the loss on GM is $850 million (or 1.6 solyndras) greater than in May. Were the stock to retest its 52-week low of $18.72, the loss would be $1.75 billion (or 3.3 solyndras) more than the Treasury estimate.

Optimistic assumptions are also embedded in GM’s balance sheet, for example in its pension plan accounting. At the end of 2011 GM estimated that its domestic pension plans were underfunded by $25.4 billion, but this figure relied on an assumed long term return on plan assets of 8.00%. When ten-year US Treasuries are yielding 1.65%, “optimistic” doesn’t quite capture the full measure by which GM’s estimate is detached from reality. The term “lunatic” springs to mind as a more accurate substitute. …

Late Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm is only Conan O’Brien because the rest are on August hiatus.

The U.S. leads China in both gold medals and total number of medals. In response, China said, “That’s nice but we still have all your money.”

The US women win the soccer gold medal. All of us in America are happy for the athletes and thrilled we don’t have to watch soccer for four more years.

A brief history of the lawnmower from Popular Mechanics.

“Gentlemen will find using my machine an amusing … healthful exercise.” — BRITISH MECHANIC EDWIN BUDDING’S PATENT APPLICATION FOR THE FIRST LAWNMOWER, 1830

1868: The reel-type spiral-bladed cutter makes its stateside debut via manufacturer Amariah Hills, who receives the first U.S. patent for the machine.

1921: Knud and Oscar Jacobsen introduce a mower with a purpose-built gas engine. The reel-mowing machine cuts a blistering 4 acres a day—perfect for the golf courses, parks, and cemeteries it’s intended to maintain. …

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George Will on the Ryan pick.

When, in his speech accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” a media wit at the convention supposedly exclaimed, “Good God, Goldwater is going to run as Goldwater.” When Mitt Romney decided to run with Paul Ryan, many conservatives may have thought, “Thank God, Romney is not going to run as Romney.” …

 

… Romney embraced Ryan after the sociopathic — indifferent to the truth — ad for Barack Obama that is meretricious about every important particular of the death from cancer of the wife of steelworker Joe Soptic. Obama’s desperate flailing about to justify four more years has sunk into such unhinged smarminess that Romney may have concluded: There is nothing Obama won’t say about me, because he has nothing to say for himself, so I will chose a running mate whose seriousness about large problems and ideas underscores what the president has become — silly and small.

 

He on whose behalf the Soptic ad was made used to dispense bromides deploring “the smallness of our politics” and “our preference for scoring cheap political points.” Obama’s campaign of avoidance — say anything to avoid the subject of the country’s condition — must now reckon with Ryan’s mastery of Obama’s enormous addition to decades of governmental malpractice. …

… Romney’s selection of a running mate was, in method and outcome, presidential. It underscores how little in the last four years merits that adjective.

In May James Pethokoukis wrote a Paul Ryan background piece for Commentary.

It’s probably safe to assume that no elected official in America understands the ins and outs of the labyrinthine U.S. budget the way Paul Ryan does. The 42-year-old Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the House Budget Committee has dreams of completing the small-government Reagan Revolution so that America might avoid repeating the “managed decline” of Old Europe. Ryan knows the numbers and projections and models backward and forward. He knows the strengths and weaknesses of his own arguments about reforming the EntitlementState and of those espoused by his opponents across the aisle and inside the Obama White House. He knows how the legislative process can breathe life into ambitious budget plans or, far more often, suffocate them in the cradle.

Ryan knows it all to a fine granularity. And that is not all he knows. As a veteran of the conservative movement who started out writing speeches for Jack Kemp and William J. Bennett at their joint think tank, Empower America, Ryan knows how three decades of off-and-on conservative governance in Washington have given credence to the notion that, in domestic affairs, Republicans understand how to cut taxes—and not much else. This has certainly been the case when it comes to fixing America’s social-insurance entitlements. Creating a financially sustainable safety net that does not sap America’s economic dynamism has been a political and policy puzzle, and repeated attempts to solve it have ended in economic or political disaster, or both.

Consider this: In 1983, President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill struck a deal to save Social Security through a combination of benefit cuts and tax increases. The agreement continues to be highlighted by Democrats as a model for bipartisan reform. Yet not only was Social Security not saved—the program almost immediately veered back into long-term insolvency—but several decades of surpluses in the Social Security “lockbox” were used cynically to make federal budget deficits look smaller than they were. For instance, if you don’t count “borrowings” from the Social Security trust fund, the four-year, $559 billion surplus in the late 1990s was really a two-year, $88 billion surplus. …

And just a few days before Romney’s pick, David Harsanyi wrote, “Why Not Paul Ryan?”

… So, no matter whom Republican Mitt Romney finally taps as his vice presidential nominee, Democrats will accuse this person of crimes against common decency and fairness. This person will, you can bet, be indicted as someone hellbent on “dismantling” Social Security, sacrificing Medicare to the gods of social Darwinism and “slashing” the safety net into worthless tatters.

If that’s the case, why not pick a politician who actually speaks about reforming entitlement programs in a serious way? Someone who has actually come up with some ideas that reach beyond platitude? Rep. Paul Ryan, who was spotted pushing a frail wheelchair-bound elderly woman off a cliff in a political ad last year, is really the only person on the shortlist we keep hearing about who fits the bill.

Obama strategist David Axelrod has already written that Ryan, like Romney, has “a conviction that our future will be brighter if we simply pass even bigger tax cuts for the wealthy; dramatically shift health care costs from Medicare to seniors, and walk away from our national commitments to education, research and development, and new energy technology.”

Rest assured David Axelrod is going to regurgitate the exact same nonsense no matter whom Romney picks. …

Robert Costa profiled Ryan for National Review.

… According to Romney insiders, Romney deeply appreciated Ryan’s willingness to privately share his critique of the campaign during the heated Republican primary, where Romney often struggled to make his case. As he watched from afar, long before he endorsed, Ryan drafted a series of detailed strategy and policy advisories, and discussed them with Romney over the phone. For Romney, those corporate-style memos made a lasting impression — and catapulted Ryan into Romney’s circle, where he has remained since.

“Both men are intelligent and very empirically minded, driven by facts,” says Peter Wehner, a friend of Ryan’s and a former Bush and Reagan administration official. “When he looks at Ryan, Romney probably sees somebody like himself, a person he’d want at his side in the business world or the political world. They approach complicated problems the same way.” …

Sara Murray writes an interesting piece for the WSJ on the behind the scenes of the pick logistics.

The day before Rep. Paul Ryan was introduced as Mitt Romney’s running mate, he surreptitiously walked through his backyard in Janesville, Wisc., and was smuggled, with the help of a congressional aide and a 19-year-old, to a Fairfield Inn in North Carolina.

“We wanted to try to do this very quietly and looked at maps and put it together,” said Beth Myers, the woman who coordinated Mr. Romney’s pick, recounting the tale in an airport hangar here after Mr. Ryan of Wisconsin had been named as the Republican running mate and Kid Rock’s “Born Free” had been blasted at Romney-Ryan rallies Saturday across Virginia.

She mostly got her wish. Even though plenty of aides had been briefed on the vice presidential pick — foreign policy adviser Dan Senor, senior adviser Ed Gillespie, chief strategist Stuart Stevens, campaign manager Matt Rhoades and longtime friend Bob White, among others– the news stayed under wraps until just hours before the official announcement.

Ms. Myers gleefully unraveled the events of the weekend, explaining how Mr. Ryan stole past his childhood treehouse in an a quiet escape from Janesville Friday and ultimately landed in front the U.S.S. Wisconsin in Norfolk Saturday morning, where he was announced as joining the the 2012 Republican ticket.

Getting to the moment of the surprise announcement was a long and tortured process. …

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Ryan is the big news. Jennifer Rubin comments.

Heading into the weekend, I’ll leave for publication some thoughts about Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the vice presidential pick whom Right Turn has been touting for some time. In the event Ryan isn’t the pick, what follows will be a historical keepsake.

There are many Democrats and pundits (some overlap there, I agree) who will be puzzled by Mitt Romney’s selection of Ryan as his pick. But it’s no mystery to those who’ve spent time with Ryan and come to understand what makes both men tick.

As for how this came about, I can say that early in the primary season Ryan and his staff worked cooperatively with Romney and his team. Ryan’s effort was not to self-promote, but to urge Romney to be clear and unequivocal in his policy pronouncements. He encouraged Romney to set up the election as one of two competing visions. It was advice Romney was primed to hear, and the candidate’s tax and entitlement reform plans came to resemble Ryan’s to a large degree. The policy views and much of the rhetoric of the two men converged as the primary race continued.

Romney is above all else a problem-solver, a doer and a fixer. Ryan, likewise, is a policy maven who has since 2007 been trying to advance budget, tax and health-care reforms, moving the Republican Party to become the champion of market-based reform. Ryan is a smart man, certainly the smartest in Congress, with an eye for detail and a facility with numbers. Romney prizes brains, precision and the ability to wield numbers. Ryan uses a scalpel, not a sledge hammer in skewering his opposition; Romney likewise uses piles of data to slay his competitors (as he did in the Florida and Arizona GOP primary debates). Ryan is personally and professionally disciplined, a straight arrow with a gee-whiz brand of optimism. Romney is as well.

The joke has been that Ryan could be Romney’s sixth son. He is, to my eye, more the younger brother, the brains and the idea factory for the top of the ticket who will sell himself as the leader best able to execute the Romney-Ryan vision.

The left will be effusive about the opportunity to renew Mediscare. But the Ryan team has been fighting that fight for some time and is perfectly willing to engage President Obama, who has heckled but not lead on entitlement reform. Who better than Ryan to take on the president while Romney sails above the fray?

Ryan has not been a governor or a CEO, but he has led his party and developed an agenda that House and Senate Republicans eventually embraced. He has shown himself to be the most capable conservative in educating the public and fitting specific policies into a bigger theme. That would have made him fully qualified to be at the top of the ticket.

The selection will thrill conservatives, intrigue commentators and surprise, I imagine, the left. So much time has been spent trying to smear Romney personally that Obama and his team may find it difficult to get back to a debate on policy. With Ryan, they will find that doubly hard. Oh, and that debate with Vice President Biden will be a knee-slapper.

 Steve Hayward does the honors for Power Line.

… I suspect Ryan is one of the few Republicans Obama genuinely fears; after all, Ryan schooled Obama in Obama’s faux-”health care summit” early last year. (Obama does not look pleased in the video.) David Brooks reports, by the way, that Obama never picks up the phone to try to talk with Ryan.
Ryan is not simply fearless about the issues, he also gets the larger picture, and can talk about the larger picture in a way that Kemp often fell short. Ask Kemp about any other question than taxes, and you’d often hear a rambling answer that tied inner city education problems to the gold standard. That’s why his presidential prospects withered.  Ryan, on the other hand, has immense facility to talk about the broader principles of the republic; he’s not just a number-crunching bean counter.

Check out the opening to his speech to CPAC this year:

“There are those who say modern society is too complicated for the average man or woman to deal with. This is a long-standing argument, but we heard it more frequently after the mortgage credit collapse and financial meltdown in 2008. They say we need more experts and technocrats making more of our economic decisions for us. And they argue for less “political interference” with the enlightened bureaucrats … by which they mean less objection by the people to the overregulation of society.

If we choose to have a federal government that tries to solve every problem, then as long as society keeps growing more complex, government must keep on growing right along with it. The rule of law by the people must be reduced and the arbitrary discretion of experts expanded. . .

If the average American can’t handle complexity in his or her own life, and only government experts can … then government must direct the average American about how to live his or her life. Freedom becomes a diminishing good.
But there’s a major flaw in this “progressive’” argument, and it’s this. It assumes there must be someone or some few who do have all the knowledge and information. We just have to find, train, and hire them to run the government’s agencies.

Friedrich Hayek called this collectivism’s “fatal conceit.” The idea that a few bureaucrats know what’s best for all of society, or possess more information about human wants and needs than millions of free individuals interacting in a free market is both false and arrogant. It has guided collectivists for two centuries down the road to serfdom — and the road is littered with their wrecked utopias. The plan always fails!”

Hmm, who does this remind me of? Oh yeah, that guy we call the Gipper, who said this in his first inaugural address:

“From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? …”

Charles Krauthammer makes the case for running against Obama’s ideas rather than his record. Of course, his dismal record is the result of the foolish ideas.  

There are two ways to run against Barack Obama: stewardship or ideology. You can run against his record or you can run against his ideas.

The stewardship case is pretty straightforward: the worst recovery in U.S. history, 42 consecutive months of 8-plus percent unemployment, declining economic growth — all achieved at a price of an additional $5 trillion of accumulated debt.

The ideological case is also simple. Just play in toto (and therefore in context) Obama’s Roanoke riff telling small-business owners: “You didn’t build that.” Real credit for your success belongs not to you — you think you did well because of your smarts and sweat? he asked mockingly — but to government that built the infrastructure without which you would have nothing.

Play it. Then ask: Is that the governing philosophy you want for this nation?

Mitt Romney’s preferred argument, however, is stewardship. Are you better off today than you were $5 trillion ago? Look at the wreckage around you. This presidency is a failure. I’m a successful businessman. I know how to fix things. Elect me, etc. etc.

Easy peasy, but highly risky. If you run against Obama’s performance in contrast to your own competence, you stake your case on persona. Is that how you want to compete against an opponent who is not just more likable and immeasurably cooler but spending millions to paint you as an unfeeling, out-of-touch, job-killing, private-equity plutocrat? …

As we said in these pages upon Obama’s election four years ago;

Americans have much to be proud of today. The election of an African-American to the highest office in the land is an outstanding achievement. A testament to the open minded  tolerance of this country’s citizens; at least, the majority of them.

 

Do you think the press and the rest of the world will stop telling us how racist we are? Maybe now they’ll notice that the American people had already moved on.

 

Nineteen years ago Virginia elected the first black governor in the country Then, Pickerhead was proud to vote for the Democrat Doug Wilder over the hapless Marshall Coleman. This time however, it is discouraging to see a doctrinaire leftist selected by the voters. Nothing but trouble, follows in the wake of officials who use the state’s power to compel and direct behavior.

 

And, this is second time the Dems have given us a president who throws a baseball like a girl. What’s with that?

Karl Rove says the fact that Romney is even now, means he is ahead. 

Wednesday’s Gallup poll had President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney essentially tied, with Mr. Obama at 47% and Mr. Romney at 46%. That’s good news for the challenger: Mr. Romney has absorbed a punishing three-month Obama television barrage that drained the incumbent’s war chest. Historically, undecided voters tend to break late for the challenger.

Mr. Romney and his campaign have also raised their game. After Mr. Obama declared on July 13 that “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” Mr. Romney went on offense, saying the following Tuesday in Pennsylvania that the notion entrepreneurs didn’t build their businesses was “insulting.” Wednesday in Ohio, Mr. Romney attacked Mr. Obama for not having met with his Jobs Council for six months. Thursday in Massachusetts, Mr. Romney belittled the White House’s explanation that the president had failed to do so because he “has a lot on his plate.” The following Tuesday in Nevada before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Mr. Romney criticized Mr. Obama over cuts in defense and veterans care.

Each time, Mr. Romney’s message was delivered in the morning and dominated the day’s coverage. That change appears now to be standard procedure for Team Romney. …

Bryan Preston in Pajamas Media posts on why the Obama folks ran with the ad that suggest Romney was the cause of a women’s death.

… we’re dealing with something in the Obama campaign that we haven’t seen much at the top of American life, except in the worst moments of the Clinton era. We’re dealing with a president who is entirely without any sense of ethics, honor or morals. He has lived a lie for most if not all of his life, hiding his true political convictions in gauzy language that makes him appear reasonable and moderate. Having lived a lie, what’s one more lie, in the service of keeping himself in power? What’s one more lie if, in Obama’s mind, it accomplishes the “good” of keeping Romney out of power?

The danger for the Obama camp is that they risk going over a tipping point. There is a point at which the negativity becomes absurd, and instead of depressing the opponent’s vote, angers the opponent’s supporters and draws the undecided over to the opponent’s side. No one can really put a finger on where that point is, but it’s real and we saw the effect of reaching that point in the Texas Senate run-off last week. The Dewhurst campaign went too far into negative territory, no one really believed their last-minute attacks, and the backlash ended up ensuring that Cruz would win running away. Obama risks the same dynamic hitting him.

The Obama campaign has gone from accusing Romney of boyhood bullying to adulthood felony, to being a murderer in all but name. What accusation is left to throw at him? There aren’t many, but rest assured that the Obama campaign and its allies will find one.

Another government pay outrage from California; meter maids making almost $100,000 a year.

When contemplating the many reasons cities in California and elsewhere are venturing closer to bankruptcy, look no further than the relatively lucrative and often-unjustifiable salaries bestowed on municipal employees – and the lofty pension benefits attached to the high pay.

One of the latest examples comes from the California coastal city of Hermosa Beach, where some community service staffers who collect money from parking meters and manage their operations – positions once widely known as “meter maids” – are making nearly $100,000 a year in total compensation, according to city documents.

There are 10 parking enforcement employees for the 1.3-square-mile beach city southwest of downtown Los Angeles, and they pull down some disproportionate compensation, considering their job functions. In fact, the two highest-earning employees for fiscal year 2011-12 are estimated to have made more than $92,000 and $93,000, respectively, according to city documents provided by Patrick “Kit” Bobko, one of five council members and who also serves as mayor pro tem. Those two have supervisory roles. The other eight parking-enforcement employees make from $67,367 to $84,267 in total compensation. …

More silliness from the Cherokee senate candidate.

With all of the talk about tax returns dominating the national news, Massachusetts Senate candidate  Elizabeth Warren undoubtedly figured she could make some hay against Scott Brown on the topic, and get a little national media attention in the process.  Why she thought that Brown, an attorney who has spent 30 years in the National Guard and had just been promoted to the rank of colonel, was wealthy enough to make income-tax returns a big issue is itself a mystery than may never be unraveled.

But unraveled is a great way to describe her attack — after the media pointed out that Brown has already disclosed more years of income-tax returns than Warren has:

Elizabeth Warren demanded Monday that Senator Scott Brown release more of his tax returns. The only problem was that Brown, her Republican rival, had already released six years of tax returns while Warren has refused to release more than four years of her filings.

Now that Brown has been established as the more transparent candidate in the race, will Warren match Brown?  Nope:

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Veronique de Rugy from George Mason has a revealing chart of job creation under presidents all the way back thru Truman.

… Here is what the data show:

Since President Obama took office, fewer jobs were created than were lost. Actually, some 300,000 fewer Americans are employed then when the president took office. That’s mainly because a large number of jobs were lost during 2009 and the so-called recovery is the slowest one of all time, with very meek monthly job creation and weak economic growth.

It would take Obama roughly 280,000 new jobs per month for every month from now until January 2013 to get him out of last place. [He would need 2.1 million new jobs per month for every month until January 2013 to catch up to Carter.]

While it would be unfair to compare Obama with Clinton, this chart shows that at this point President Obama’s job numbers are far worse than Presidents Carter, Kennedy, and Ford, who were in office almost as long or served much shorter periods than he has.

This chart also shows two-term presidents:

Presidents Clinton and Reagan saw the highest gains in jobs and maintained some of the lowest unemployment rates during their administrations.

President George W. Bush’s overall record is underwhelming [to say the least], especially considering that so many of the jobs created during his term were government jobs.

Here also are a few facts about our labor market.

In theory, we are exactly three years into recovery.

This is the slowest recovery in history.

Wage growth over the last twelve months is the slowest ever.

We have the slowest economic growth of any recovery.

We have had an important drop in labor-force participation that makes unemployment rates look better than they probably should.

Now, there is an important question: Under these conditions, are we really recovering? …

De Rugy alludes to another chart, this one prepared by Keith Hall of the Mercatus Center at George Mason. Here is the description of that chart.

The release of the June labor market data marks the third anniversary of the official end of the recession in June 2009. Thus, this is a good moment to look at the single best indicator of U.S. labor market health. As is so often the case, it is also one of the simplest: the employment-to-population ratio. In essence, this tells us what share of the working-age population (16-years old and above) has a job. When the ratio goes up, things are getting better. When it doesn’t, the labor market is not recovering.

 

So, what kind of labor market recovery have we seen over the past three years? As the graph shows, the answer is simple: NONE. Job growth hasn’t been strong enough to support our growing population. The employment-to-population ratio was 59.4% three years ago. It hit a 25-year low of 58.5% in October of 2009, and yet it remains at just 58.6% today.

To know what kind of job growth we need for economic recovery, we must first realize that the United States is still a growing nation. Each month, the working-age population grows by an estimated 180,000 people. Simply to support this growing population, we need to add at least 130,000 new jobs. With anything less, we fall further behind. No matter what the other economic data indicates, a true labor market recovery requires job growth strong enough to consistently raise the employment-to-population ratio. This would mean adding at least 250,000 new jobs per month, every month, for years.

Power Line introduces us to yet another lie from the administration.

Delphi, a General Motors company, is one of the world’s largest automotive parts manufacturers. When the government bailed out GM, 20,000 Delphi workers lost nearly their entire pensions. But Delphi employees who were members of the United Auto Workers union saw their pensions topped off and made whole.

The White House and Treasury Department have consistently maintained that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) independently made the decision to terminate the 20,000 non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan. The PBGC is a federal government agency that handles private-sector pension benefits issues. Its charter calls for independent representation of pension beneficiaries’ interests.

But now, the Daily Caller has obtained emails showing that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of the 20,000 salaried Delphi retirees. According to the Daily Caller, the emails contradict testimony given to Congress by Former Treasury official Matthew Feldman and former White House auto czar Ron Bloom, both key members of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry during the GM bailout. …

Ed Morrissey has more on the Delphi pensions.

… Very obviously, Treasury was at least involved in the decision-making, if not the ultimate decider of the Delphi pension termination.  A Treasury spokesman insisted to the DC that the PBGC made the decision on its own, but it looks pretty clear that the PBGC was at least coordinating efforts with the Obama administration.  To the extent that any officials testified differently, we may be seeing more subpoenas and Congressional hearings in the near future.  One question in particular will be why the PBGC terminated the non-union pension while taxpayers absorbed the union pension obligations, and whether that outcome was coordinated all along by the White House.

Richard Epstein exposes the foolish fracking opinions of Tom Friedman.

It is amazing how quickly the technological and political landscape can change over a period of only four years. At this point during the 2008 presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama was touting a promising future that featured scads of new jobs in the green energy business. The United States would be able to solve two problems with one bold stroke. It didn’t quite pan out that way. The Solyndra website leads off with its promise of “Clean and Economical Solar Power from Your Large Rooftop,” only to note that the bankrupt firm has suspended operations in order to evaluate its reorganization options.

This brutal reality reflects one insuperable difficulty with these renewable energy sources. Today, as in 2008, no one has found a way to store them except at a prohibitive cost. Unlike the much maligned fossil fuels, wind and solar power must be used when they are created, whether needed or not. Both wind and solar power sources are highly variable, so that, all too often, they are in greatest supply when they are least needed. In the absence of a seismic technological breakthrough, they are doomed to remain boutique sources of energy that cannot be counted on to power the economy going forward. 

These major difficulties have not stopped the United States government from lavishing extensive subsidies on an industry that is ill-equipped to use them. These subsidies programs have failed for mundane but compelling reasons. No government has ever succeeded in trying to shape industrial policy with state subsidies, for the simple reason that it has neither the knowledge nor the incentives to pick which fields make sense to invest in or which firms in these fields have latched onto a viable technology.

No government should, of course, ban investments in solar and wind energy, but the prudent strategy is to let these investments be made by venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs who might actually know what they are doing. And currently, the smart money seems to be steering clear of renewable energy technologies.

At the same time that renewable energy sources have proved to be a stupendous bust, the fossil fuel business has undergone a mini revolution. I am not speaking of the sorry state of affairs with ethanol, whose huge subsidies, given the current drought, are now wreaking havoc in the food market because of its sheltered status as a “renewable” energy source under current regulation. No, the huge source of the new revolution is fracking, which has transformed the energy market. …

… it is disconcerting to see the environmental backlash against the expansion of fracking, as was recently defended by Thomas Friedman in a recent op-ed entitled “Getting it Right on Gas.” Relying on a set of recommendations from the International Energy Agency (IEA), Friedman takes the position that what is good news in the short run could in reality spell bad news in the long run. The great fear, we are told, is that the United States could remain “addicted to fossil fuels for decades,” which Friedman denounces as “reckless.”

Friedman’s nightmare scenario has two components. The first is that government regulators could go soft on the pollution that fracking creates in both water and air. The second is that the short-term success of fracking will dull the incentives to invest in renewables, which emit no pollution at all.          

Neither objection leads to a sound energy policy. …

Ever wonder why Washington always gets it wrong? Phillip K. Howard says it is because DC is a deviant sub-culture.

Behavior that would seem grotesque to most Americans doesn’t raise an eyebrow inside the Beltway. Only radical change can fix the problem. 

A deviant subculture is defined by sociologist Anthony Giddens as one “whose members have values which differ substantially from those of the majority in a society.”

American government is a deviant subculture. Its leaders stand on soapboxes and polarize the public by pointing fingers while secretly doing the bidding of special interests. Many public employees plod through life with their noses in rule books, indifferent to the actual needs of the public and unaccountable to anyone. The professionals who interact with government — lawyers and lobbyists — make sure every issue is viewed through the blinders of a particular interest, not through the broader lens of the common good. Government is almost completely isolated from the public it supposedly serves. The one link that is essential for a functioning democracy — identifiable officials who have responsibility to accomplish public goals — is nowhere to be found. Who’s in charge? It’s hard to say. The bureaucracy is a kind of Moebius strip of passing the buck. The most powerful force in this subculture is inertia: Things happen a certain way because they happened that way yesterday. Programs are piled upon programs, without any effort at coherence; there are 82 separate federal programs, for example, for teacher training. Ancient subsidies from the New Deal are treated as sacred cows. The idea of setting priorities is anathema. Nothing can get taken away, because that would offend a special interest. …

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Streetwise Professor posts on half measures in Syria.

… Perhaps this is just a dodge, and the Saudis, Qataris, and others are going to provide weapons that will permit the rebels to combat more effectively the heavy weapons, artillery, and fixed and rotary wing aircraft that the Syrian military has in its arsenal while the US retains sort of plausible deniability.  But maybe this is just another example of Obama’s lead-from-behind, half-in, half-out approach to military matters, Afghanistan being another prime example.  Commit enough to generate significant casualties, but not enough to achieve any decisive or lasting result.

Unless the objective is to encourage a protracted and brutal civil war in Syria, such half measures are catastrophic, both as a matter of policy and as a matter of humanity.  Strengthening the rebels some, but not enough to overcome the government, will prolong the suffering, and also prolong the uncertainty in the region, which is the last thing it needs.

As Fisher (or was it Macauley?-sources disagree) said: moderation in war is imbecility.  As Napoleon said (no disagreement about attribution here): If you want to take Vienna-or Damascus-take Vienna-or Damascus.

But that’s probably the nub of the problem.  Obama doesn’t know what he wants, or if he knows, is unwilling to take any political risk to get it.  So he continues the cynical game of leaking information about his “secret” military aggressiveness, while failing to make hard decisions about what to do with Assad.  This moderate course is a recipe for stalemate-which will condemn thousands to death and injury.  We know by hard experience that we cannot dictate outcomes in that region, but we can influence them.  No outcome is likely to be all that desirable, but letting things go on their own without a more robust attempt to influence them seldom works out well in that part of the world.

James Pethokoukis says Obama’s recovery is not only worse than Reagan’s but also worse than Teddy Roosevelt’s and Grover Cleveland’s. Each of those followed financial crises.

Some great charts from economist John Taylor putting the weak economic recovery in some deep historical perspective. First, here is the three-year old Obama recovery. As Taylor points out, “The gap between real GDP and potential GDP (CBO estimates) is not closing at all. That is the main reason why unemployment remains so high.” It’s just not getting better:

Next, here is the Reagan recovery after the 1981-82 recession. Again, you have severe drop, but then the output gap between is closed.

But let’s go much further back and look at two recoveries that occurred after financial crises. Here’s the recovery after the Panic of 1907, a downturn which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve:

Finally, here is the Depression of 1893:

No Federal Reserve stimulus. No $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And yet, 100 years ago, the U.S. economy somehow managed to recover after two nasty downturns, each marked by a banking crisis.

Maybe we’re not doing it right.

Richard Cohen, one of stable of WaPo liberals, is disgusted by Harry Reid.

In “The Godfather Part II,” a senator from Nevada is portrayed as corrupt. His name is Pat Geary. In real life, a senator from Nevada is a jerk. His name is Harry Reid.

Reid is where he loves to be: the center of controversy. He has accused Mitt Romney of paying no taxes for 10 years. Romney denies the accusation and challenged Reid to put up or shut up. In an apparent response, Reid repeated the charges on the Senate floor. Countless aides have echoed their boss. They and he attribute their information to a source they will not name.

Whether such a source exists, really, is beside the point. It could be that someone did indeed tell Reid that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. Journalists get that sort of tip all the time, and their responsibility is (1) to check it out and (2) identify the source. Reid has not done the latter and apparently has not done the former, either. The truth is that Reid doesn’t really care if the charge is true or not. He would prefer the former, but he’ll settle for the latter.

 For Reid, this is yet another brazen and tasteless partisan attack. As majority leader, he has managed to sink the public image of the Senate even lower than it would otherwise be. He contributes to bad feelings, gridlock and the sense — nay, the reality — that everything is done for political advantage. Reid is a crass man, the very personification of the gaudy and kitschy Las Vegas Strip.

Still, he is not some backbencher, but the Senate majority leader. He is the face of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the ally of President Obama. Yet, not a single Democrat has had the spine to rebuke Reid. The White House has been given the chance and explicitly ducked its duty. Other members of the Senate have run for cover. They fear Reid and, if truth be told, sort of like what he’s doing — constantly needling Romney, keeping him on the defensive about taxes and his insistence on releasing only two years of his returns.

The politics of this squabble are delightful. But Reid has managed to draw both his party and his president into the gutter with him. When Reid accuses the Republicans of being overly partisan, he now lacks all credibility. For a long time it’s been difficult to believe anything he says. Now, it’s impossible.

As for Obama, he is tarnished by this episode. The fresh new face that promised us all a different kind of politics is suddenly looking cheesy. The soaring rhetoric that Obama used in his first campaign has come to ground in the mud of Harry Reid’s latter-day McCarthyism.

When Obama goes down to defeat in November, one of the causes will be the delicious irony he cannot manage money. Just like he has mis-spent trillions of dollars in our economy, on a smaller scale he has mis-spent millions in the campaign. As George Will might say; a condign punishment. NY Times has the story.

President Obama has spent more campaign cash more quickly than any incumbent in recent history, betting that heavy early investments in personnel, field offices and a high-tech campaign infrastructure will propel him to victory in November.

Since the beginning of last year, Mr. Obama and the Democrats have burned through millions of dollars to find and register voters. They have spent almost $50 million subsidizing Democratic state parties to hire workers, pay for cellphones and update voter lists. They have spent tens of millions of dollars on polling, online advertising and software development to turn Mr. Obama’s fallow volunteers corps into a grass-roots army.

The price tag: about $400 million from the beginning of last year to June 30 this year, according to a New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission records, including $86 million on advertising.

But now Mr. Obama’s big-dollar bet is being tested. With less than a month to go before the national party conventions begin, the president’s once commanding cash advantage has evaporated, leaving Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee with about $25 million more cash on hand than the Democrats as of the beginning of July.

Despite Mr. Obama’s multimillion-dollar advertising barrage against Mr. Romney, he is now being outspent on the airwaves with Mr. Romney benefiting from a deluge of spending by conservative “super PACs” and outside groups. While Mr. Romney has depleted much of his funds from the nominating contest, he is four weeks away from being able to tap into tens of millions of dollars in general election money. And many polls show the race to be very close.

Mr. Obama’s cash needs — he spent $70.8 million in June alone, more than half on advertising and far more than he raised — have brought new urgency to his campaign’s fund-raising efforts. His advisers have had to schedule more fund-raising trips than originally planned to big-money states like New York, according to donors involved in the effort. The super PAC supporting his campaign, Priorities USA Action, is enlisting former President Bill Clinton as a rainmaker, hoping to counter its conservative counterparts.

While Mr. Obama will also have access to general election money in September, he is unlikely to have the same spending advantage over Mr. Romney as he had during the primary season, when Mr. Romney spent much of his money battling Republican rivals. …

Maybe the Obama campaign will conserve cash by not paying their bills. Andrew Malcolm reports they are stiffing the city of Newport Beach, CA. 

Here’s how much financial trouble Barack Obama’s presidential campaign appears to be in:

He’s stiffing the California city of Newport Beach $35,000 for extra security costs incurred when the campaigner-in-chief held a fundraiser in the oceanfront community early this year.

The bill is already nearly two months overdue. The Democratic National Committee and Secret Service are giving the city the old “Talk to them, No, talk to them” routine that would immediately get any real business operation on the Better Business Bureau’s “Do Not Hire Again” list. …

Speaking of California, Walter Russell Mead posts on its future.

… Once again, California’s dysfunctional governance has utterly failed the state’s residents. California can’t afford to enforce its own laws: an absurd and even insane position for a state to be in. California needs laxer laws that lock fewer people up, or it needs a bigger prison budget but there are no sane grounds on which the status quo can be defended. Forced by the US Supreme Court to do something, the state has acted with its characteristic fecklessness and passed the buck: handing the problem off to local governments, which, we should add, are facing serious fiscal problems of their own and are ill-equipped to deal with new prisoners.

California is in a hole but can’t seem to stop its compulsive digging. Schools, universities, prisons, pensions, cities and towns: the state has lost the ability to manage even the most basic elements of communal living. But foie gras is now illegal there, grandiose plans for white elephant fast trains built with borrowed money waft through the air, and the state continues to boost the self esteem of affluent and cause-oriented gentry liberals by scattering scarce resources to the four winds, hunting unicorns when the cupboard is bare.

Someday, perhaps, California will be governed by people who care about governing: that is to say, educating the kids, balancing the books, enforcing the law. Until then, it offers the rest of us a spectacle and a warning. It is some spectacle and some warning. California remains awesome, even in decline.

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David Harsanyi says the White House and media can’t spin the jobs numbers.

Remember: We’re now on our 42nd straight month of unemployment at or above 8 percent, and the President of the United States is out on the campaign trail arguing that raising taxes and spending money will fix it.

And how is that working out for us?

In July, the Labor Department reports, the economy added 163,000 jobs and unemployment ticked up to 8.3 percent. The economy, which typically needs around 100,000 jobs just to keep pace with the new workers entering the labor market, is on a three-month average of 105,000.  So another disaster. (Also, job creation in June was revised down to 64,000.)

The White House claims that “today’s employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover.” But stagnation is not recovery — a noun, meaning a return to a normal state of health or strength. Unless, that is, this is the new normal and voters accept it.

You expect the White House to spin, but the media’s take on these numbers — though subtle — is also misleading.

“Despite the seemingly good news,” reports CNBC (seemingly good news!), “the report’s household showed that the actual amount of Americans working dropped by 195,000,” as labor force participation is at a 30-year low. As Jim Pethokoukis at AEI likes to point out, if the workforce were the same as when George W. Bush left office, the unemployment rate would be 11 percent. Seemingly, indeed. …

Investors.com editors say “163,000 jobs” is pure bs.

… The 163,000 figure becomes even more suspect when you consider that 150,000 people left the workforce in July — something that almost never happens when the economy is expanding and creating new jobs. In short, the 163,000 “new” jobs is a mirage due mostly to seasonal adjustments — not real jobs.

Nor is this a one-month phenomenon. Since Obama stepped into office, 7.5 million people have left the workforce — calling all the administration’s claims of job “gains” into question.

Yes, some of those people have retired. But the vast majority has become so disgruntled with their job prospects that they’ve quit looking.

What Obama didn’t mention was that the monthly employment survey of households — which is used to create the unemployment rate — shows a stunningly different picture than the business payroll data.

By this household measure, the number of jobs plunged by 195,000, pushing the unemployment rate up to 8.3% from 8.2%. So talk of job gains is deceptive.

And, indeed, alternative measures of the unemployment rate show far worse problems. The so-called U3 measure of unemployment is the one most people know. It shows 8.3% joblessness, and 12.9 million people with no job.

But the government also releases what it calls the U6 measure — one that takes into account discouraged workers and those who, as the Labor Department puts it, are “marginally attached” to the labor force.

What does U6 show? It shows an alarming 15% unemployment rate — with 23 million people having no job. Worse, the U6 measure of unemployment is rising as the economy slows down. …

 

Matthew Continetti covers the Romney coverage.

… As Dan Quayle, John Ashcroft, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Charles and David Koch know all too well, once the Democrats and their allies in the media have determined the story they are going to tell about a conservative political figure, nothing can change the emphasis or tone of their coverage. The media portrayed Quayle and Palin as airheads, and that was that. They called Ashcroft a religious fundamentalist, and he was berated and dismissed from polite society. They said Limbaugh was a racist and a sexist, and entire public relations campaigns were launched to deprive him of sponsors. They “reported” that the Koch brothers’ political giving was entirely self-interested, and hardly anyone who edits our major newspapers or produces our network news gave these philanthropists the benefit of context—let alone the benefit of the doubt.

With Romney the storyline had proven more elusive. Before settling on “gaffe-prone” the media had difficulty choosing between extremes. They shoot at Romney coming and going. One day he is a bully, the next day he is a wimp. One day he has “no core,” the next day he is a radical. One day he is out of touch, the next day he is pandering to his base. In the morning they say Romney is too vague, in the evening they say his specific policies will be ruinous. Romney is too secretive, but what we know about him is scary. The whiplash from attack to attack provokes nausea. Some, like Harry Reid, have taken simply to making things up.

And who can blame him? The media have displayed an insatiable and indiscriminate appetite for negative stories about Romney, his wealth, his company, and his religion. The narrative of Mitt Romney, gaffe-machine, colored media coverage of the foreign trip before it even began. As Romney was making his way to England, journalists were asking his campaign to follow-up on a Daily Telegraph report in which an unnamed “adviser” said the United States and the United Kingdom “are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and [the governor] feels that the special relationship is special. The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”

Whether the quote was true or false, it was nevertheless unremarkable. The United States and the United Kingdom do share the same heritage. And the White House has seemed particularly dismissive of our longtime ally—its communications director, for example, did not even know that it had returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the British Embassy. The Obama campaign and the media were just waiting for a moment to accuse Romney of criticizing the president on foreign soil. David Axelrod called the banal, possibly fictitious quote “stunningly offensive.” Joe Biden said it was “beneath a presidential campaign.” Points scored.

The pattern was established. Throughout his trip Romney would say something perfectly well meaning and true, and the press would declare it a gaffe and the voyage a horrible failure. He stated the obvious to Brian Williams: There were concerns over London’s preparedness for the Olympics. From the ensuing coverage you would have thought he had just spat on the Queen. …

Michael Barone says the media are finding ways to ignore news they don’t understand.

Americans keep behaving in ways that baffle the liberal mainstream media. Two examples figured prominently–or should have–in last week’s news.

One is the runoff primary for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Texas. Former state Solicitor General Ted Cruz thumped incumbent Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, 57 to 43 percent.

Cruz won even though the Texas Republican establishment, from Gov. Rick Perry on down, endorsed Dewhurst. So did the Austin lobbying community, since Dewhurst as lieutenant governor has run the state Senate for the last 10 years (and, having lost this race, will do so for at least the next two).

Dewhurst has had a generally conservative record and had no problem getting elected and reelected statewide four times. And he spent liberally from the fortune he made in the private sector.

To be fair, some MSM outlets did run stories on Cruz’s rise in the polls since he ran behind Dewhurst by a 45- to 34-percent margin in the May 29 primary. And it’s not uncommon for a second-place finisher to overcome the primary winner in a runoff.

But there’s a pattern here that the big liberal press has been reluctant to recognize: Candidates from the GOP establishment are getting knocked off by challengers with less name recognition, far less money, and the support of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party was supposed to be dead and gone, you know. …

Great Corner Post from Mark Steyn.

Previously on Dallas:

Only six months ago the Canadians were planning to ship nearly all of this newly developed oil to Texas via the Keystone Pipeline. Environmentalists, however, swore the pipeline would be built over their dead bodies and President Obama, not wanting to be left with no natural constituencies except single mothers and minorities, decided to appease environmentalists and block the pipeline.

The Canadians were shocked. They had long planned to sell this oil south of the border. Canada is already our largest supplier of foreign oil and it was inconceivable that we wouldn’t want to take more it instead of relying on Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, and other unpredictable sources.

America had been offered first refusal, and had refused it. So, after they got over being shocked, Canada looked elsewhere for business partners. Last week, the Chinese announced they were buying a Canadian company with major interests in those oil sands that Obama & Co have no interest in. Whatever one’s feelings about this Sino-Canuck deal, it does not appear to fall under the jurisdiction of a New York senator and a Massachusetts congressman. Nevertheless:

I am speaking, of course, of Senator Charles Schumer of New York and Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts, both of whom have decided we are in a position to tell a Chinese company that it cannot acquire a Canadian company because… well, because we’re Americans and the world has to pay attention to what we say.

My weekend column concludes with a tweet from Huffington Post/MSNC honcho Howard Fineman on what Washington can learn from the London Olympics:

“Brits long ago lost their empire,” he tweeted, “but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully.”

Fineman and other lefties who commend this line might want to ponder on the likelihood of America declining “gracefully” as opposed to imploding through a pitiful Schumeresque combination of hollow bullying and self-destructive buffoonery: The Brokest Nation in History thinks it can dictate to its principal energy supplier and its principal loan shark what business deals it will permit them to do. Good luck with that.

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Writing in Bloomberg News, Virginia Postrel gives the back story to “you didn’t build that” in the form of a book review of Bourgeois Dignity.

The controversy surrounding President Barack Obama’s admonishment that “if you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” has defied the usual election-year pattern.

Normally a political faux pas lasts little more than a news cycle. People hear the story, decide what they think, and quickly move on to the next brouhaha, following what the journalist Mickey Kaus calls the Feiler Faster Thesis. A gaffe that might have ruined a candidate 20 years ago is now forgotten within days.

Three weeks later, Obama’s comment is still a big deal.

Although his supporters pooh-pooh the controversy, claiming the statement has been taken out of context and that he was referring only to public infrastructure, the full video isn’t reassuring. Whatever the meaning of “that” was, the president on the whole was clearly trying to take business owners down a peg. He was dissing their accomplishments. As my Bloomberg View colleague Josh Barro has written, “You don’t have to make over $250,000 a year to be annoyed when the president mocks people for taking credit for their achievements.”

Hectoring Entrepreneurs

The president’s sermon struck a nerve in part because it marked a sharp departure from the traditional Democratic criticism of financiers and big corporations, instead hectoring the people who own dry cleaners and nail salons, car repair shops and restaurants — Main Street, not Wall Street. (Obama did work in a swipe at Internet businesses.) The president didn’t simply argue for higher taxes as a measure of fiscal responsibility or egalitarian fairness. He went after bourgeois dignity.

“Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s buying power), to the current global average of $30 — and much higher in developed nations. (McCloskey’s touchstone is Norway’s $137 a day, second only to tiny Luxembourg’s.)

That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient. Hence the book’s subtitle: “Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.”

Peggy Noonan does a column of various election year snippets.

From a friend watching the Olympics: “How about that Michael Phelps? But let’s remember he didn’t win all those medals, someone else did. After all, he and I swam in public pools, built by state employees using tax dollars. He got training from the USOC, and ate food grown by the Department of Agriculture. He should play fair and share his medals with people like me, who can barely keep my head above water, let alone swim.”

The note was merry and ironic. And as the games progress, we’ll be hearing a lot more of this kind of thing, because President Obama’s comment—”You didn’t build that”—is the political gift that keeps on giving.

They are now the most famous words he has said in his presidency. And oh, how he wishes they weren’t.

***

There was lots of chatter this week about the decision to have Bill Clinton speak in prime time on the penultimate night of the Democratic Convention. Is it a sign of panic? Would the president give Big Dawg such a prominent spot if he wasn’t nervous? Does it gall him to ask for help from the guy who said of his 2008 candidacy, “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen”?

But all this kind of misses the point.

The central fact of Bill Clinton is that he is really good at politics. And he has every reason to want to give a really good speech—to show he’s still got it like nobody else, to demonstrate he’s still the most beloved figure in the party, to do his wife proud. And of course to rub Mr. Obama’s nose in it.

David Harsanyi says Barack is no Bill.

Former President Bill Clinton is slated to deliver a prime-time address at the Democratic National Convention. No doubt, he’s going to give one hell of a talk. The man is on his game, enjoying the highest favorable ratings he’s seen since 1993; a robust 66 percent of Americans think highly of the former president.

It’s a politically astute choice by Barack Obama, as “there isn’t anybody on the planet who has a greater perspective on not just the last four years, but the last two decades, than Bill Clinton,” David Axelrod explained to The New York Times. “He can really articulate the choice that is before people.”

He sure can. Or, rather, he sure could, if he felt like it. Problem is that if Clinton actually used his perspective, he’d be giving a rousing convention speech on the benefits of free trade and free markets at the Republican convention. After all, if the man from Hope has taught America one thing, it’s that even a power-abusing letch can be great for prosperity if he just leaves the economy alone.

Jeff Greenfield says things don’t look good for the president.

I got into writing and thinking about politics because I was told there would be no math.

Boy, was I misled. It’s not just the torrent of polls that we have to deal with, but the numbers that supposedly forecast Presidential elections with uncanny accuracy. Depending on whom you turn to, the key lies in second quarter real GDP growth, the optimism or pessimism of the electorate, individual or family real income growth or a dizzying mix of these and other measurements.

They’re usually economic, although one prognosticator—Allan Lichtman, history professor at American University—uses broader measurements, asking whether the incumbent or challenger is charismatic or whether the incumbent party has presided over a major change in social policy. (This is considered a positive, although I don’t know if we’ve ever had a case like the Affordable Care Act, which—unlike every other major social change—passed without bipartisan backing and remains broadly unpopular.)

I’m a skeptic about the predictive power of these numbers for many reasons. For one thing, the “sample size,” which totals about twenty or so Presidential elections since most of these measurements were first made, is too small. For another, they work—unless they don’t. In 1968, strong economic figures were trumped by a divisive war and by social unrest. In 2000, every economic forecasting model predicted that Al Gore would win a comfortable or landslide plurality. They were “right” in the sense that he got half a million more votes than Bush; they were “wrong” in the fundamental outcome they offered.

So it’s with that skepticism in mind that I offer, not a prediction, but a flat pre-election assessment: If President Barack Obama is to win, he is going to have to overcome a set of numbers that no incumbent President, or incumbent party, has ever managed to surmount.

Charles Lane reviews “Failing Law Schools” for WaPo.

… “Many law professors at many law schools across the country are selling a degree to their students that they would not recommend to people close to them,” Tamanaha writes. He also accuses them of lying about it: Some schools have been caught luring students with inflated post-graduation employment statistics.

If you think those claims sting, consider Tamanaha’s argument that law school effectively transfers money from students to relatively well-to-do professors, via student-loan debt — much of which is ultimately guaranteed by federal taxpayers who are generally not as well-off as the typical law professor.

Law school faculties are also bastions of liberal politics, and this irony is not lost on Tamanaha, who accuses the professoriate of not only enriching itself but also erecting de facto barriers to upward social mobility and true public-service law practice, all in the name of “academic freedom” and other abstractions.

Tamanaha argues that most law schools should emphasize lower-cost practical training, perhaps in fewer than the three years of study that are standard now. The resulting lawyers would serve the mundane but vital needs of ordinary people, a surprisingly large number of whom cannot afford representation even though they are not indigent. It would be an honorable calling and a decent living.

Tamanaha’s message — that law schools fail to fulfill this social purpose and that their failure is due to their selfishness and myopia — may not go over well in faculty lounges. But it is an important one nonetheless.

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Krauthammer sums up Romney’s trip.

… Romney’s point about “culture” was to highlight the improbable emergence of Israel from resourceless semi-desert to First World “start-up nation,” a tribute to its freedom and openness, just as free-market Chile stands out from state-dominated Ecuador.

Look at how Romney was received. In Israel, its popular prime minister lavished on him a welcome so warm as to be a near-endorsement. In Poland, Romney received an actual endorsement from Lech Walesa, former dissident, former president, Cold War giant, Polish hero.

Two staunch U.S. allies salute a man they would like to see lead the free world. Yet the headlines were “shove it” and “culture.”

Scorecard? Romney’s trip was a major substantive success: one gaffe (Britain), two triumphs (Israel and Poland) and a fine demonstration of foreign-policy fluency and command — wrapped, however, in a media narrative of surpassing triviality.

Marty Peretz was the subject of the WSJ Interview this weekend.

‘I bought the NewRepublic to take back the Democratic Party from the McGovernites,” the legendary editor and publisher Martin Peretz says. Now, he fears, George McGovern’s ideas may be back in vogue within the party.

The 1972 election and the domestic drama surrounding the Vietnam War caused a major schism between Democrats. On one side were supporters of Mr. McGovern, the U.S. senator and presidential candidate who preached engagement and accommodation with communism. On the other were those who thought the rise of the McGovernites spelled disaster for Democrats and the nation, and who were determined to return the party to a responsible center on foreign policy.

Mr. Peretz, then a HarvardUniversity lecturer and a veteran of the antiwar movement, was in the latter camp. Two years after Richard Nixon thumped Mr. McGovern in the election, he purchased the NewRepublic, the flagship liberal magazine founded in 1914. Under Mr. Peretz’s ownership the magazine promoted a set of foreign-policy ideas that gradually reconquered the Democratic mainstream. Chief among these were a willingness to deploy military power to advance national interests and values, plus an abiding commitment to Israel as a mirror of American ideals in an unfree Middle East.

Since selling the NewRepublic to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes in 2011, however, Mr. Peretz, now 73, has emerged as a vociferous critic of Barack Obama and much of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment. His break with the president he campaigned for in 2008 has been sharp and painful. The Obama administration’s worldview, he now thinks, represents a radical departure from the “healthily hard-ass” foreign policy he has long championed on the left. Mr. Peretz is especially disturbed by Mr. Obama’s failure to support Israel at a time when the Jewish state faces an unprecedented combination of threats. …

… To Mr. Peretz, the notion that Arab cultures are beset with endemic pathologies is noncontroversial, almost a banal point. “[Mitt] Romney was said to have made a tremendous faux pas when he said that the difference between the Palestinians and the Israelis is a matter of culture,” alluding to historian David Landes’s book, “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.”

“Mostly David discusses their social cooping up of women as a factor in Arab poverty, backwardness, et cetera,” Mr. Peretz explains. “Now, this would be, if you were talking generally, a very acceptable and progressive critique.” Indeed, “one of the reasons that you have economic backwardness is that women do not work and women do not get education.”

That Mr. Romney should have to go on the defensive over his remarks, Mr. Peretz thinks, has to do with the fact that “the magazines and the websites that are popular among the liberal, semi-intelligent, semi-intellectual readership of America have their own ideological blinders.”

Mr. Peretz has little patience for such pieties. And he holds few hopes that the recent Arab uprisings will make the region more liberal or peaceful. …

Stanley Kurtz outlines the plans Obama has for the suburbs.

President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term. The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.

Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.

The alliance endures. One of Obama’s original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America, which continues Gamaliel’s anti-suburban crusade under another name. Kruglik and his close allies, David Rusk and Myron Orfield, intellectual leaders of the “anti-sprawl” movement, have been quietly working with the Obama administration for years on an ambitious program of social reform.

In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at the White House. …

Remember last week the story about Nancy Black the whale watch captain who ran afoul of the Feds for violating some law about marine mammals? Three Thousand miles away the same stupid feds are creating food for great white sharks. Jammie Wearing Fool has the story.

…’The booming, federally protected seal population basking in Bay State waters will only bring more hungry, dead-eyed great white sharks closer to shore — where they can strike in as little as 6 feet of water, experts warn.

State wildlife officials said yesterday they’re tracking nine great whites — the most they’ve ever had tagged — but it’s not clear whether that lethal group includes the stealthy predator that attacked a bodysurfer off Ballston Beach in Truro on Monday afternoon, splattering blood on the beach.

The victim, Christopher Myers, is recovering from leg injuries at Massachusetts General Hospital in what officials called the first attack by a great white in Massachusetts since a fatal strike in 1936.

Swarming the Cape coast in pockets from Eastham to Chatham, seals — a protected species for the past four decades — are being blamed for the sudden spike in shark sightings.

“Nature is out of balance,” said Michael Snell, a former Truro beach commissioner. “Until we start harvesting seals, we are going to keep having these kind of problems.” ‘ …

Veronique de Rugy and Nick Gillespie team up on a look at congress.

Despite looming deadlines related to budget sequestration and decade-old “temporary” tax rates that expire at year’s end, massive entitlement crises and much more, Congress has effectively stopped work on serious legislation until at least some time after November’s election. 

Many observers and participants — including the entire GOP and Democratic leadership — are quick to cry gridlock and to blame inaction on some new awful hyper-partisan or ideological era.

But there isn’t gridlock, which usually results from Democrats and Republicans sharing power and clashing over alternative positions. Gridlock slows things down — almost always a good thing — but it doesn’t stop serious legislation from happening. Welfare reform, balanced budgets, defense cuts and capital-gains tax rate cuts in the 1990s were all the product of gridlock that slowly gave way to consensus.

And today’s Congress is more than happy to pass legislation when it suits members’ interests. In just the past few months, for instance, the ostensibly gridlocked Congress reauthorized the Export-Import Bank program that gives money to foreign companies to buy U.S. goods; extended sharply reduced rates for government-subsidized student loans; re-upped the Essential Air Service program that subsidizes airline service to rural communities; and voted against ending the 1705 loan-guarantee program that gave rise to green-tech boondoggles such as Solyndra and Abound. None of these were party-line votes — all enjoyed hearty support from both Democrats and Republicans.

Another instance of budding bipartisanship is the pork-laden farm bill that extends sugar subsidies, maintains crop subsidies and creates a “shallow-loss program” that effectively guarantees incomes for farmers at a time when that sector is doing historically well. The bill passed the Senate with 16 GOP votes. Though the House version of the bill is still being worked out, no one doubts it will not only pass, but largely resemble the Senate version.

What we’re actually witnessing — and have been for years now — is not gridlock, but the abdication of responsibility …

The White House has actually apologized to Sir Charles over the bust flap. Nile Gardiner has the story.

The Obama White House: in apology mode.

The Obama presidency is fond of issuing apologies for America on the world stage, but very rarely makes them at home to Americans. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer has just issued one to Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, who last week wrote an op-ed berating the Obama administration for removing a bust of Sir Winston Churchill from the Oval Office when it came to power. Pfeiffer had issued a stinging attack on Krauthammer, alleging that his Churchill bust reference was “100 percent false.” Krauthammer was of course 100 percent correct, and the British Embassy in Washington even issued a statement contradicting Pfeifer’s remarks.

Here is the full text of Pfeiffer’s mea culpa, published on the White House blog in the form of an open letter to Mr. Krauthammer: …