Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Hinderaker at Power Line has some good advice for Romney partisans; keep calm and carry on.

As Paul noted last night, the Gallup Poll currently has Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney by six points, 50-44. Paul expressed skepticism about that finding, with which I agree. Why would Obama be enjoying a spike in support over the last week? Are voters happy to see an American ambassador murdered and the Middle East in flames, while our economy continues to stagnate? I don’t think so.

Certainly the Rasmussen survey, which tracks likely voters, hasn’t seen any similar bump for Obama. As of today, Rasmussen’s three-day rolling numbers have the race tied 46-46. It couldn’t be closer: with “leaners” included, Rasmussen has it 48-48, and in the swing states it’s 46-46.

Obama’s resurgence in the Gallup Poll looks suspiciously like the one that Gallup gave Jimmy Carter in 1980. As we noted a couple of weeks ago, Gallup tried to convince its readers in October 1980 that Carter had surged to an eight-point lead over Ronald Reagan:

 

So, were voters suddenly happy about American hostages being held in Iran for a year, or about high unemployment and skyrocketing prices? Of course not. The Carter bounce was entirely fictional, caused either by lousy polling technique or an effort by Democrats at Gallup to drum up support for their candidate. I suspect that this year’s Obama bounce is cut from the same cloth.

Still, there is no denying that Republicans are nervous. This election shouldn’t be close, given Obama’s record, yet it looks as though it will be. So everyone has advice for the Romney campaign. …

WSJ Editors listened to the Obama excuses and responded.

… “When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history.1 And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for,2 as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for,3 a prescription drug plan that was not paid for,4 and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.5

“Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this increase in the deficit,6 and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.7″

Footnote No. 1: Either Mr. Obama inherited the largest deficit in American history or he won the 1944 election, but both can’t be true. The biggest annual deficit the modern government has ever run was in 1943, equal to 30.3% of the economy, to mobilize for World War II. The next biggest years were the following two, at 22.7% and 21.5%, to win it.

The deficit in fiscal 2008 was a mere 3.2% of GDP. The deficit in fiscal 2009, which began on October 1, 2008 and ran through September 2009, soared to 10.1%, the highest since 1945.

Mr. Obama wants to blame all of that on his predecessor, and no doubt the recession that began in December 2007 reduced revenues and increased automatic spending “stabilizers” like jobless insurance. But Mr. Obama conveniently forgets a little event in February 2009 known as the “stimulus” that increased spending by a mere $830 billion above the normal baseline.

The recession ended in June 2009, but spending has still kept rising. The President has presided over four years in a row of deficits in excess of $1 trillion, and the spending baseline going forward into his second term is nearly $1.1 trillion more than in fiscal 2007.

Federal spending as a share of GDP will average 24.1% over his first term including 2013. Even if you throw out fiscal 2009 and blame that entirely on Mr. Bush, the Obama spending average will be 23.8% of GDP. That compares to a post-WWII average of a little under 20%. Spending under Mr. Bush averaged 20.1% including 2009, and 19.6% if that year is left out. …

… Footnote No. 5: Mr. Obama keeps dining out on the excuse of the recession, but that ended halfway through his first year. The main deficit problems since 2009 are a permanently higher spending base (see Footnote No. 1) and the slowest economic recovery in modern history. Revenues have remained below 16% of the economy, compared to 18% to 19% in a normal expansion.

The 2008 crisis is long over. The crisis now is Mr. Obama’s non-recovery.

Footnote No. 6: Even at face value, Mr. Obama’s suggestion that he is “only” responsible for 10% of what the government does is ludicrous. Note that in addition to his stimulus, what he calls “emergency actions” include his new health-care entitlement that will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even using low-ball assumptions.

But the larger point concerns executive leadership. Every President “inherits” a government that was built over generations, which he chooses to change, or not to change, to suit his priorities. Mr. Obama chose to see the government he inherited and grow it faster than any President since LBJ. …

 

More on this from Veronique de Rugy at The Corner.

Who remembers President Obama’s first budget? I do. It was called “A New Era of Responsibility.” Back then, the president promised that he would cut the deficit to $912 billion in 2011 and to $581 billion by 2012. But that’s another of the president’s promises that never come to pass. As Fiscal Year 2012 nears to an end, the data shows that the deficit for 2012 will surpass a trillion dollars for the fourth straight year in a row.

But according to the president, he has almost no responsibility in this sad state of affairs. In fact, he claims that “90 percent” of the deficit is due to President Bush’s policy:

Over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

That’s a remarkably bold statement considering that President Obama has been in office for four years, and that he has engaged in seriously expansive policies of his own. I am always happy to remind conservatives about the incredible fiscal irresponsibility that reigned during the Bush years, but for Obama to claim that he shares almost no responsibility (10 percent, to be precise) in this fourth trillion-dollar deficit is ridiculous.

In fact, Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler looked at the claim this morning and concludes that the president deserves four Pinocchios for it. …

September 24th Pickings had poll analysis from Charlie Martin at Pajamas Media. Martin added more which we have today.

It isn’t unusual for the state of the polls to be a big issue this close to an election, but this week has been different from any previous campaign I remember — it’s not who’s ahead in the polls, it’s the polls themselves that are the big topic of discussion. My article “Skewed and Unskewed Polls” got picked up by both Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh’s Stack O’ Stuff and — along with plenty of other contributions — made the topic of how polls are being performed into a national one.

The problem is that the discussion (as happens only too often) is now being led by people who don’t understand the whole topic very well. So let’s just talk about this a bit. I promise to almost completely eliminate the math; believe it or not, people can learn to reason about statistics without learning the central limit theorem.

Imagine a future day when, through technology and psychic powers, we can at any moment take an instant poll, checking what people mean in their heart of hearts to do when they vote in November. (And let’s not think what else could be done with that technology — this is a thought experiment.)

Secretary Dumbledore, Minister of Polling, goes into the office and pushes the appropriate button, and the poll is taken, click. It’s 51,267,303 for Romney and 49,109,941 for Obama, with 2,007,007 undecided. Does this tell us how the election is going to really come out? No, because it’s still 40 days (and nights) into the future. People may change their minds. Some people will die unexpectedly. And those two million-odd undecideds will have to either decide how to vote or decide not to vote at all.

And that’s the way it would work if we had this Perfect Magical Polling Wizardry. That would be a perfect poll.

Of course, we don’t. So this is what real polling companies do: …

Joel Gehrke in Beltway Confidential reports 55 percent of small businesses would not be started under this regulatory regime.

Fifty-five percent of small business owners and manufacturers would not have started their businesses in today’s economy, according to a new poll that also reports 69 percent say President Obama’s regulatory policies have hurt their businesses.

“There is far too much uncertainty, too many burdensome regulations and too few policymakers willing to put aside their egos and fulfill their responsibilities to the American people,” said Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, which commissioned the poll along with the National Federation of Independent Businesses. “To fix this problem, we need immediate action on pro-growth tax and regulatory policies that put manufacturers in the United States in a position to compete and succeed in an ever-more competitive global economy.”

The poll reports another ominous statistic for job creation: “67 percent say there is too much uncertainty in the market today to expand, grow or hire new workers.” Why? Because “President Obama’s Executive Branch and regulatory policies have hurt American small businesses and manufacturers,” according to 69 percent of the business owners surveyed. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

More on polls. This time from John Nolte at Breitbart.

If you’re going to believe the polls released from CBS/New York Times this morning — you know, the polls the media’s currently using to beat Romney senseless and to depress Republican enthusiasm, you have to believe that the turnout advantage for Democrats over Republicans will blow away every previous record and common sense. 

It’s that simple. Because these polls are not only telling us that Romney is losing OH, PA, and FL by insurmountable margins; these polls are also telling us that Democrat turnout is projected to blow away every modern record.   

But these media polls don’t headline what they’re seeing as far as the Democrat turnout advantage because no one would believe it. In fact, no one believes Obama will match the D+7 nationwide advantage he enjoyed in 2008. And no one certainly believes he will surpass it.  

Oh, except this non-stop litany of media polls being wielded like weapons by the corrupt media.  

Here are the CBS/New York Times internals.  And here’s the con the CBS/NYTs is attempting to pull: …

Jennifer Rubin examines the president’s UN speech.

President Obama is so soaked in the State Department/Western European/ leftist intellectual goo of moral relativism and disdain for core American values that I doubt he understood how offensive were his remarks at the United Nations today.

After fessing up that our embassy people were killed by terrorists (he doesn’t say what kind, however) and reciting that violence is never justified he then once again denounced the anti-Islam video. And he delivers this:

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.

Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims and Shia pilgrims. It’s time to heed the words of Gandhi, “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.”

Together, we must work towards a work where we are strengthened by our differences, and not defined by them. That is what America embodies. That’s the vision we will support.”

Where to begin?

Let’s start with the simple observation that he is the president and not the minister of religion. It is not necessary for him to select out one or another references to the Divine. (No “God of Moses”?). It sounds like blatant pandering and it is.

The fact that he embodies the U.N. mantra on defamation of religion (“slander”) is even more regrettable. This is, as informed watchers of the U.N. know, an invidious movement to control and suppress speech, to prevent criticism of Islamic extremists and to use the West’s legal system against itself.

Moreover, Obama is heading down a path to nowhere in which every statement of intolerance theoretically must be individually condemned by our government. But he doesn’t mean it. The hypocrisy is evident. He doesn’t and will never do this when Evangelical Christians are vilified, when art displays portray Jesus in offensive ways or when Broadway musicals jab at Mormons. …

Jonah Goldberg asks what Obama has learned.

The Oval Office isn’t the place to learn on the job. That was the line from both Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2008. In fairness, that’s always the argument the more experienced candidate uses against the less experienced candidate (just ask Mitt Romney).

But Barack Obama seemed a special case, easily among the least experienced major-party nominees in U.S. history. A Pew poll in August 2008, found that the biggest concern voters had with Obama fell under the category of “personal abilities and experience.” In a “change” year, Americans swallowed those concerns and voted for the change candidate.

Four years later, it’s worth asking, “What has Obama learned?”

Several journalists have asked that exact question. And Obama’s answers raise another question: Can Obama learn?

In July, CBS News’s Charlie Rose asked Obama what the biggest mistake of his first term was. Obama replied it “was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right.”

Getting the policy right is important, Obama continued, “but the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.” …

… His claim that he was too busy “getting the policy right” to tell the people a story is doubly creepy in its lack of self-awareness. All the reporting about Obama’s first term suggests that he outsourced the heavy lifting on the stimulus, “Obamacare,” and Wall Street reform to the Democratic leadership while he indulged his logorrheic platitudinousness. According to Bob Woodward’s new book, even Nancy Pelosi hit mute on the speakerphone (which she’s denied) during one of Obama’s perorations, and she and Harry Reid went on with their meeting.

In his first year, Obama barely stopped talking to the American people, who unfortunately didn’t always have a mute button handy. According to CBS’s Mark Knoller, Obama gave 411 speeches or statements (52 addresses solely on health-care reform), 42 news conferences, 158 interviews, 23 town-hall meetings, and 28 fundraisers.

And what did Obama learn from all of this? Nothing, nothing at all.

Andrew Malcolm cuts to the chase.

It’s probably safe to surmise that if, as he did, Barack Obama bothered to set up a formal teleprompter in the manure-sprinkled dirt of a rodeo arena for remarks to a captive crowd back in 2008, he doesn’t care much what people think. 

To be sure, he and his sleeveless wife have followed that pattern consistently during their 1,344 days of White House residency with her mother. He launched a war against Libya without congressional approval, while he took his extended family around South America. Nine days later he consented to explain his military actions.

Obama took two months to talk to the country about its worst environmental disaster, the Gulf oil spill. 

The Obamas entertained Hollywood celebrities at lavish White House parties while millions of Americans lost jobs, homes and hope during recovery-less Recovery Summers. While her husband urged Americans to vacation on the recovering GulfCoast, Michelle Obama flew off to a luxury resort in Spain with numerous friends. 

Like many in the 1%, Obama plays golf, 104 presidential rounds to be exact. But only Obama was Commander-in-Chief, presiding at one point over the conduct of three wars — and the awful sacrifices by others involved in armed conflicts, while Obama lined up challenging putts.

But with a national election just six weeks from today, a voter verdict he so clearly is desperate to win, this guy has carried an oblivious insouciance to unparalleled heights — or depths. 

Several weeks ago as a few dozen Virginians began to collapse in the afternoon heat during an unusually long Obama lecture, the president noted paramedics were on the way. But instead of wrapping up, he offered the audience advice on how to stand while he finished.

An American ambassador is killed on duty in Libya on 9/11, the first in three decades, along with three countrymen. Obama reads a tribute to their sacrifice and heads to Vegas for fundraising. …

London’s Telegraph sends a reporter to a town in Ohio to find voters who like Obama. Slim pickings.

There is a narrative in Washington that goes like this: swing voters basically like Barack Obama. They like his level temperament and they like his modern charm. They like pictures of him and his young family and their rambunctious dog, Bo. They like that he can sing, that he can shoot a three-pointer on the basketball court and can deliver a joke on late night.

The narrative is so strong that even Mitt Romney appears to buy into it. During his covertly-filmed remarks to donors at a Florida fundraiser, he warned that all-out assaults on the President’s character could backfire and that voters don’t want to be told Obama is a failure. “They like him,” the Republican conceded.

But as Dunkirk’s residents gathered for a communal meal of chicken noodles and mashed potato on Tuesday night there was little evidence of the latent affection that Washington has diagnosed.

In some cases the hostility took a predictable form. Ray Petty, a kind-hearted handyman with an eager smile, said he had always voted Democrat and was a big fan of both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. But he lit up with delight as he explained that Obama was a Muslim born outside the United States. “We’ve got to watch out for the Islamic birthrate,” he says, still smiling.

Another man quietly noted that Obama had won Ohio in 2008 even though “I’ve never met anyone who voted for him”. He trails off, leaving the conservative spectre of voter fraud hanging over the meal.

But even away from those whose dislike for Obama is anchored in conspiracy and ignorance, it is still hard difficult to find anyone with kind words to say about the President. …

John Hinderaker at Power Line follows up on Elizabeth Warren’s missing law license.

Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign is, I think, going rapidly down the drain. On top of her affirmative action fiasco comes another scandal: it appears that she has been practicing law in Massachusetts without a license for some years.

Credit William Jacobson, who, like Warren, is a law professor, for the discovery. Jacobson has been one of the most effective members of the blogosphere over the last couple of years, and this story is a tribute to his dogged investigation. His initial post is here. Jacobson establishes that Warren is not licensed in Massachusetts, and never has been; that she is not currently licensed to practice law anywhere; that Warren repeatedly listed her Cambridge, Massachusetts office as her law office in court filings; and that Warren in fact practiced law out of her Cambridge office. If all of that is true, as seems incontestable, Warren has a lot of explaining to do.

It is important to note that Warren has done a considerable amount of legal work in recent years, and has been well paid for it. She was paid a fee by Travelers Insurance Company, to cite just one example, that was in the low six figures. So we are not talking about a casual, borderline situation. Warren indisputably is practicing law, and by her own repeated assertion, she is doing so in Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts Rules of Professional Responsibility treat this subject as the rules do in most states. Rule 5.5 addresses the unauthorized practice of law. Rule 5.5 (b) sets out the basic prohibition on practicing law in Massachusetts without a Massachusetts license:

(b) A lawyer who is not admitted to practice in this jurisdiction shall not:

(1) except as authorized by these Rules or other law, establish an office or other systematic and continuous presence in this jurisdiction for the practice of law; or

(2) hold out to the public or otherwise represent that the lawyer is admitted to practice law in this jurisdiction.

Emphasis added. On the undisputed facts, it appears that Warren has violated this prohibition. She admittedly is not licensed in Massachusetts, and yet she has established a law office in Massachusetts–one which she has referenced on any number of appellate briefs, and in which she has earned a large amount of money. Absent an exception, she is guilty as charged. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jeff Jacoby tells the story of how Jimmy Carter IV, grandson of the president, located the famous Romney 47% tape. The grandson said his actions were in part payback for the way the GOP treats the hapless former president.

… You can’t fault the guy for wanting to defend his grandfather’s reputation, but Jimmy Carter’s reputation as a foreign-policy schlemiel can hardly be blamed on the Romney campaign. Americans came to that conclusion more than 30 years ago, having watched the world grow more dangerous — and America’s enemies more brazen — during Carter’s feckless years as steward of US national security.

“There was strong evidence that voters … wanted a tougher American foreign policy,” reported The New York Times on November 5, 1980, the morning after Ronald Reagan crushed Carter’s reelection bid in a 44-state landslide. By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio, voters surveyed in exit polls “said they wanted this country to be more forceful in dealing with the Soviet Union, ‘even if it increased the risk of war.’”

In fact, Reagan’s muscular, unapologetic approach to international relations — “peace through strength” — didn’t increase the risk of war with the Soviets. It reduced it. Within a decade of his election, the Soviet empire — as Reagan foretold — would be relegated to the ash-heap of history. …

… Is it fair to compare Obama’s foreign policy to Carter’s? The similarities were especially vivid after the murder of four US diplomats at the American consulate in Benghazi. Even more so when the administration insisted that the outbreak of anti-American violence by rampaging Islamists in nearly 30 countries was due solely to a YouTube video mocking Islam — a video the White House bent over backward to condemn.

But Obama-Carter likenesses were being remarked on long before this latest evidence of what the appearance of US weakness leads to. Obama was still a presidential hopeful when liberal historian Sean Wilentz observed in 2008 that he “resembles Jimmy Carter more than he does any other Democratic president in living memory.” Within weeks of Obama’s inauguration, troubling parallels could already be detected. In January 2010, Foreign Policy magazine’s cover story, “The Carter Syndrome,” wondered whether the 44th president’s foreign policy was beginning to collapse “into the incoherence and reversals” that had characterized No. 39′s.

The Carter years are a warning of what can happen when the “Leader of the Free World” won’t lead. It may irk his grandson to hear it, but Jimmy Carter’s legacy is still too timely to ignore.

Jeffrey Lord in the American Spectator takes off from the Dick Morris column in September 24th Pickings and shows how the New York Times and Washington Post have tried to help liberal Dems with polls.

Dick Morris is right.

Here’s his column on “Why the Polls Understate the Romney Vote.”

Here’s something Dick Morris doesn’t mention. And he’s charitable.

Remember when Jimmy Carter beat Ronald Reagan in 1980?

That’s right. Jimmy Carter beat Ronald Reagan in 1980.

In a series of nine stories in 1980 on “Crucial States” — battleground states as they are known today — the New York Times repeatedly told readers then-President Carter was in a close and decidedly winnable race with the former California governor. And used polling data from the New York Times/CBS polls to back up its stories.

Four years later, it was the Washington Post that played the polling game — and when called out by Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins a famous Post executive called his paper’s polling an “in-kind contribution to the Mondale campaign.” Mondale, of course, being then-President Reagan’s 1984 opponent and Carter’s vice president.

All of which will doubtless serve as a reminder of just how blatantly polling data is manipulated by liberal media — used essentially as a political weapon to support the liberal of the moment, whether Jimmy Carter in 1980, Walter Mondale in 1984 — or Barack Obama in 2012. 

First the Times in 1980 and how it played the polling game.

The states involved, and the datelines for the stories: …

… Here is how the Times played the game with the seven of the nine states in question.

• Texas: In a story datelined October 8 from Houston, the Times headlined:

Texas Looming as a Close Battle Between President and Reagan

The Reagan-Carter race in Texas, the paper claimed, had “suddenly tightened and now shapes up as a close, bruising battle to the finish.” The paper said “a New York Times/CBS News Poll, the second of seven in crucial big states, showing the Reagan-Carter race now a virtual dead heat despite a string of earlier polls on both sides that had shown the state leaning toward Mr. Reagan.”

The narrative? It was like the famous scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her friends stare in astonishment as dog Toto pulls back the curtain in the wizard’s lair to reveal merely a man bellowing through a microphone. Causing the startled “wizard” caught in the act to frantically start yelling, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” In the case of the Times in its look at Texas in October of 1980 the paper dismissed “a string of earlier polls on both sides” that repeatedly showed Texas going for Reagan. Instead, the Times presented this data:

A survey of 1,050 registered voters, weighted to form a probable electorate, gave Mr. Carter 40 percent support, Mr. Reagan 39 percent, John. B. Anderson, the independent candidate, 3 percent, and 18 percent were undecided. The survey, conducted by telephone from Oct. 1 to Oct. 6, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

In other words, the race in Texas is close, assures the Times, with Carter actually in the lead.

What happened? Reagan beat Carter by over 13 points. It wasn’t even close to close. …

… So the questions for 2012.

How corrupt are all these polls showing Obama leading or in a “close race”?

Are they to Obama what that California poll of the Washington Post was for Walter Mondale — an “in-kind contribution”?

Is that in fact what was going on with the New York Times in 1980? An “in-kind contribution” to the Carter campaign from the Times?

What can explain all these polls today — like the ones discussed here at NBC where the Obama media cheerleaders make their TV home? Polls that the Obama media groupies insist show Obama 1 point up in Florida or 4 points in North Carolina or 5 points in Pennsylvania. And so on and so on.

How does one explain a president who, like Jimmy Carter in 1980, is increasingly seen as a disaster in both economic and foreign policy? How does a President Obama, with a Gallup job approval rating currently at 49% — down a full 20% from 2009 — mysteriously win the day in all these polls?

How does this happen?

Can you say “in-kind contribution”?

Time has decided to hit Obama upside the head.

On Monday, President Barack Obama made his fourth pilgrimage to New York City for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. He arrived in Manhattan on a glorious autumn afternoon and rushed to his first – and only – public event of the day: a taping of ABC’s The View with his wife, Michelle. …

… Of course, meeting with world leaders when you don’t know if you’ll still have your job in the next few weeks, can be potentially awkward. It can lead to unfortunate hot-mic gaffes, of which Obama has not been immune (for example,  in Seoul earlier this year he asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to be flexible on missile defense until after the election, when Obama would have more space to maneuver–too much diplomatic candor for the sensitive electoral season). Still, ignoring the opportunity to meet one-on-one with world leaders underlined where Obama’s attention is fixed: the campaign. And it was the election that dominated the taping of The View. That, and the inside skinny of the Obama family’s schedule. …

Power Line reminds us what a liar Bill Clinton is.

Nearly twelve years after the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency it has become easy to forget this central fact about the former president: he is a pathological liar. For better or for worse, Clinton’s active participation in this year’s presidential campaign reminds us of this sad reality.

Take, for example, this exchange between Clinton and Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: Is Mitt Romney right that the only thing you can do with the Israeli-Palestinian issue is kick the can down the road?

CLINTON: No, it is accurate that the United States cannot make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. They have to do that. What we need to do is maximize the attractiveness of doing it and minimize the risks of doing it. We can do that.

And if you look at it, President Bush, when he took office, the second President Bush, I’ll never forget he said, “You know the names of every street in the old city and look what it got you. I’m not going to fool with this now.”

And immediately the death rate went up among Israelis and Palestinians because there was nothing going on.

However, as Seth Mandel explains, something was going on when Bush took office — the Second Intifada, which began under President Bill Clinton. The “death rate” went up because the Palestinians launched a terror war against Israeli civilians following the abject failure of Clinton’s Camp David peace talks. For this reason, Clinton’s attempt to blame the increased death rate of Bush’s inactivity is extremely deceptive.

It’s also fundamentally dishonest. The import of Clinton’s comment to Zakaria is that Bush rejected Clinton’s preferred course when he declined to engage in (or “fool with,” to use the perfect turn of phrase Clinton attributes to “W”) the “peace process.”

But, as Mandel shows, Clinton was dead set against trying to jump start peace talks following the failure of Camp David. Indeed, according to Martin Indyk, United States ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs during the Clinton Administration, Clinton told Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell and anyone else he could get an audience with that the new administration should not deal with Arafat, whom he called a liar who had destroyed the chance for peace. As Indyk put it in his memoir of the Clinton administration’s Middle East policy, in Clinton’s “final hours as president. . .there was one piece of unfinished business he was determined to take care of: it was payback time for Yasser Arafat.” For once, Clinton had it right on a major foreign policy issue.

It should be possible for Clinton to serve Team Obama in this election — and thus to improve the likelhood of his return to the White House in 2017 — without telling lies that place blame on George W. Bush (a non-participant in the election) for the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians during the Intifada. But Clinton can’t resist the temptation to engage in this slander — a hallmark of the pathological liar

Click on WORD orPDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn on the film and all.

… after a week and a half of peddling an utterly false narrative of what happened in Libya, the United States government is apparently beginning to discern that there are limits to what even Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice can say with a straight face. The official line – that the slaughter of American officials was some sort of improvised movie review that got a little out of hand – is now in the process of modification to something bearing a less patently absurd relationship to what actually happened. That should not make any more forgivable the grotesque damage that the administration has done to the bedrock principle of civilized society: freedom of speech

The more that U.S. government officials talk about the so-called film “Innocence Of Muslims” (which is actually merely a YouTube trailer) the more they confirm the mob’s belief that works of “art” are the proper responsibility of government. Obama and Clinton are currently starring as the Siskel & Ebert of Pakistani TV, giving two thumbs-down to “Innocence Of Muslims” in hopes that it will dissuade local movie-goers from giving two heads-off to consular officials. “The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” says Hillary Clinton. “We absolutely reject its content, and message.” “We reject the efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” adds Barack Obama. There follows the official State Department seal of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

Fellow government-funded film critics call “Innocence Of Muslims” “hateful and offensive” (Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations) and “reprehensible and disgusting” (Jay Carney, White House press secretary). Gen. Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Senior Pentagon Advisor to Variety, has taken to telephoning personally those few movie fans who claim to enjoy the film. He called up Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who apparently thinks “Innocence Of Muslims” is the perfect date movie, to tell him the official position of the United States military is they’d be grateful if he could ease up on the five-star reviews. …

… What other entertainments have senior U.S. officials reviewed lately? Last year Hillary Clinton went to see the Broadway musical “Book of Mormon.” “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others”? The Book of Mormon’s big showstopper is “Hasa Diga Eebowai,” which apparently translates as “F*** You, God.” The U.S. Secretary of State stood and cheered.

Why does Secretary Clinton regard “F*** You, God” as a fun toe-tapper for all the family but “F***, You Allah” as “disgusting and reprehensible”? The obvious answer is that, if you sing the latter, you’ll find a far more motivated crowd waiting for you at the stage door. So the “Leader of the Free World” and “the most powerful man in the world” (to revive two cobwebbed phrases nobody seems to apply anymore to the president of the United States) is telling the planet that the way to ensure your beliefs command his “respect” is to be willing to burn and bomb and kill. You Mormons need to get with the program. …

He’s fit for campaigning, but not for governing says Michael Barone.

“[T]he most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside,” Barack Obama said in an interview Thursday on the Spanish-language Univision network. “You can only change it from the outside.”

A better way to put it is that Barack Obama has proved he can’t change Washington from the inside.

One case in point is the comprehensive immigration legislation Obama promised to steer to passage in his first term. The Univision interviewers, who asked tougher questions than the president has been getting from David Letterman or various rappers, zeroed in on this issue.

With a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate and a solid Democratic majority in the House in 2009 and 2010, Obama could have pushed for an immigration bill.

Instead, he acquiesced in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision not to bring such a measure to the floor. It would require some of her members to cast tough votes.

But, with Obama’s encouragement, she did bring to the floor and pushed through a cap-and-trade bill that also required some of her members to cast tough and, in some cases, career-ending votes.

Cap and trade was a favorite of gentry liberals, the kind of people Obama regularly has seen at his 200-plus fundraising events. As for the Hispanics who want immigration legislation, he’s now promising that he’ll push it in his second term. Wait in line.

George W. Bush managed to get congressional votes on comprehensive immigration bills. Obama didn’t bother.

Obama’s inability to change Washington from the inside is also on display in Bob Woodward’s latest best-seller, “The Price of Politics.”

He tells how in a meeting of congressional leaders, Pelosi muted a speakerphone as Obama droned on lecturing members on the national interest, so the legislators could get some work done. …

Jonah Goldberg show how silly the media’s treatment of the GOP has become.

… When MSNBC got an advance copy of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s convention speech, the network landed another scoop. “For four years,” McConnell planned to say, “Barack Obama has been running from the nation’s problems. He hasn’t been working to earn reelection. He has been working to earn a spot on the PGA Tour.” A fool might think this a not-exactly-veiled reference to the fact that Barack Obama plays a lot of golf, more than 100 rounds since he was elected. But MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell is no fool.

Asked what he made of the line, O’Donnell confidently replied, “Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He’s trying to align . . . the lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama.”

Martin Bashir asked O’Donnell whether he really believed that. Couldn’t McConnell just mean what he said?

O’Donnell went into full eye-roll mode. “Martin, there are many, many, many rhetorical choices you can make at any point in any speech to make whatever point you want to make.” According to O’Donnell, McConnell’s speechwriters chose the golf reference because “these people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches.”

Bashir, who for a moment gave the impression of neural activity, was convinced. “Wow,” he exclaimed. “Things are getting lower and lower by the day.”

When Robert Welch of the John Birch Society insisted that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist, Russell Kirk famously retorted, “He’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer.” Thank goodness no one knew back then that Kirk was calling Ike a sexually promiscuous half-black man. …

The latest episode in the “Perils of Lizzie” surfaced yesterday when the news broke Warren has practiced law in Massachusetts without a license. Those laws are for little people and do not apply to card carrying liberals. Daily Caller has the story.

Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren may have practiced law in Massachusetts for years without a license to do so, according to a newly surfaced report.

Republican Sen. Scott Brown — whom Warren is challenging — reminded viewers that Warren helped represent The Travelers Insurance Company on an asbestos case which reached the Supreme Court in 2009.

In May, the Boston Globe reported that Warren argued that case before the Supreme Court. “Six months after Elizabeth Warren arrived in Washington to work as an adviser to Congress, she experienced another career milestone in the nation’s capital, a seat at the US Supreme Court’s mahogany counsel table,” the Globe wrote. “The 2009 appearance was the only time Warren helped represent a party before the nation’s highest court. And it provides a rare window into a less-heralded aspect of the Harvard Law professor’s career, her time as a working attorney in the courts.”

According to the Legal Insurrection blog, this was hardly the only case Warren was involved in. “Warren represented not just Travelers, but numerous other companies starting in the late 1990s working out of and using her Harvard Law School office in Cambridge, which she listed as her office of record on briefs filed with various courts,” Legal Insurrection’s William A. Jacobson reported on Monday morning.

There’s just one caveat: “Warren, however, never has been licensed to practice law in Massachusetts.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Dick Morris analyzes polls.

Republicans are getting depressed under an avalanche of polling suggesting that an Obama victory is in the offing. They, in fact, suggest no such thing! Here’s why:

1. All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.

In English, this means that when you do a poll you ask people if they are likely to vote. But any telephone survey always has too few blacks, Latinos, and young people and too many elderly in its sample. That’s because some don’t have landlines or are rarely at home or don’t speak English well enough to be interviewed or don’t have time to talk. Elderly are overstated because they tend to be home and to have time. So you need to increase the weight given to interviews with young people, blacks and Latinos and count those with seniors a bit less.

Normally, this task is not difficult. Over the years, the black, Latino, young, and elderly proportion of the electorate has been fairly constant from election to election, except for a gradual increase in the Hispanic vote. You just need to look back at the last election to weight your polling numbers for this one.

But 2008 was no ordinary election. Blacks, for example, usually cast only 11% of the vote, but, in 2008, they made up 14% of the vote. Latinos increased their share of the vote by 1.5% and college kids almost doubled their vote share. Almost all pollsters are using the 2008 turnout models in weighting their samples. Rasmussen, more accurately, uses a mixture of 2008 and 2004 turnouts in determining his sample. That’s why his data usually is better for Romney.

But polling indicates a widespread lack of enthusiasm among Obama’s core demographic support due to high unemployment, disappointment with his policies and performance, and the lack of novelty in voting for a black candidate now that he has already served as president. …

More on polls from Pajamas Media. 

In most all things, I try to follow Hanlon’s (or Heinlein’s) Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

This is particularly important to remember when looking at polls, Sometimes, however, one must wonder.

As I pointed out yesterday, the result of Romney’s “really bad week” was that Romney had gone from 5 or 6 points behind in Gallup, to essentially tied. Even so, a number of people have noted that there are some odd assumptions in that poll, and others. Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen talked about it recently. Asked if the polls were, in his opinion, a fair representation of the electorate, Schoen said:

“The simple answer is no John. The bottom line is there were seven percent more Democrats in the electorate in 2008 than there were Republicans. That’s from the exit polls and that’s about as accurate as you can get….President Obama won by about seven points. Given 90 percent of Democrats vote for the Democrat and 90 percent of Republicans vote for the Republican, every time you reduce the margin between the parties by one point, roughly it’s about one point off the margin.”

Schoen pointed out that the Pew poll was based on Democrats sampled for having an 11 percent voters registration edge over Republicans. He further added, “saying that America has gotten more Democratic than 2008, which is a questionable assumption.” …

Andrew Malcolm tracks the administration’s shifting story about Benghazi.

You know that act of terrorism in Benghazi last week that saw four Americans killed on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 and the consulate shelled, burned and destroyed and fleeing Americans killed in a nearby safe house that turned out to be unsafe and the Obama administration, alone in the world, said it was all clearly a spontaneous reaction to an old anti-Islam YouTube video?

Remember that? They said it for days. Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador, was sent out as sacrificial lamb on no less than five Sunday shows to peddle the same hooey about spontaneous Muslim anger.

Because if the attack wasn’t spontaneous, then it was by definition planned.

And if it was planned, why wasn’t Barack Obama, who’s skipped so many daily intelligence briefings to campaign for reelection, doing his real job?

Being, oh, say, forewarned and forearmed to protect these valiant Americans serving abroad whom he later lauded as so brave? But they couldn’t hear the presidential praise because they were dead far from home. Then, totally tone-deaf to tragedy, Obama dashed off to a Vegas fundraiser.

This administration was too clever by half. On Wednesday, when Obama was up in the Big Apple chatting with Dayyyy-vid Letterman and hobnobbing with Beyonce at $40K per head, the administration sent the director of the NationalCounterterrorismCenter to Capitol Hill. There, Matthew Olsen testified that, yes, the Benghazi attack was an act of terrorism.

Here’s the clever part of that. At first it appeared Olsen disagreed with the White House. But the next day Obama press secretary Jay Carney was able to consult his notes, agree with Olsen and baldly tell reporters: “It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.”

Wait! What?! Now, it’s obvious and self-evident? …

The Washington Examiner has produced a series of pieces about the background of Barack Obama. Mark Tapscott has the introduction.

Few if any of his predecessors took the oath of office with higher public hopes for his success than President Obama on Jan. 20, 2009.

Millions of Americans hailed his election as an end to partisanship, a renewal of the spirit of compromise and a reinvigoration of the nation’s highest ideals at home and abroad.

Above all, as America’s first black chief executive, Obama symbolized the healing of long-festering wounds that were the terrible national legacy of slavery, the Reconstruction Era and Jim Crow. We would be, finally, one nation.

But after nearly four years in office, Obama has become a sharply polarizing figure.

His admirers believe he deserves a special place alongside Wilson, the Roosevelts and LBJ as one of the architects of benevolent government.

His critics believe he is trying to remake America in the image of Europe’s social democracies, replacing America’s ethos of independence and individual enterprise with a welfare state inflamed by class divisions.

In an effort to get a clearer picture of Obama — his shaping influences, his core beliefs, his political ambitions and his accomplishments — The Washington Examiner conducted a four-month inquiry, interviewing dozens of his supporters and detractors in Chicago and elsewhere, and studying countless court transcripts, government reports and other official documents. …

 

Part One of the Examiner series covers the falsehoods about the president’s background.

First lady Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention that “Barack and I were both raised by families who didn’t have much in the way of money or material possessions.”

It is a claim the president has repeated in his books, on the speech-making circuit and in countless media interviews. By his account, he grew up in a broken home with a single mom, struggled for years as a child in an impoverished Third World country and then was raised by his grandparents in difficult circumstances.

The facts aren’t nearly so clear-cut.

Ann Dunham was just 18 years old when she gave birth to Obama. She was a freshman at the University of Hawaii. His Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., was a few years older than Ann. They were married against family wishes.

Obama Sr. does not appear to have been welcoming or compassionate toward his new wife or son. It later turned out that he was secretly married to a Kenyan woman back home at the same time he fathered the young Obama.

He abandoned Obama Jr.’s mother when the boy was 1. In 1964, Dunham filed for a divorce that was not contested. Her parents helped to raise the young Obama.

Obama’s mother met her second husband, an Indonesian named Lolo Soetoro, while working at the East-West Center in Hawaii. They married, and in 1967, the young Obama, then known as Barry Soetoro, traveled to Indonesia with his mother when the Indonesian government recalled his stepfather.

In Indonesia, the family’s circumstances improved dramatically. According to Obama in his autobiography “Dreams from My Father,” Lolo’s brother-in-law was “making millions as a high official in the national oil company.” It was through this brother-in-law that Obama’s stepfather got a coveted job as a government relations officer with the Union Oil Co.

The family then moved to Menteng, then and now the most exclusive neighborhood of Jakarta, where bureaucrats, diplomats and economic elites reside. …

WSJ OpEd provides update on Scott Brown’s race against the harpy.

With polls putting the race for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in a statistical dead heat, supporters of consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren eagerly awaited Thursday night’s first head-to-head debate between the Harvard Law School professor and incumbent Sen. Scott Brown.

It was inevitable, their oft-heard reasoning went, that the frequent Wall Street critic would use her superior intellect and unimpeachable moral standing to vanquish Mr. Brown, who for more than two years has held the seat occupied for decades by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

But like the overall campaign so far, the debate did not go the way Ms. Warren must have planned. Mr. Brown attacked during the opening minute and kept her on the defensive for most of the hour-long exchange.

Now, with a little more than six weeks to go before the election, Democrats fighting to keep control of the U.S. Senate find themselves scrambling in a state where President Barack Obama is expected to trounce former Gov. Mitt Romney, and where Democrats hold every U.S. House seat, every statewide office, and an overwhelming majority in the state legislature. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Charles Krauthammer reflects on the foreign policy debacles of this administration.

… It’s now three years since the Cairo speech. Look around. The Islamic world is convulsed with an explosion of anti-Americanism. From Tunisia to Lebanon, American schools, businesses and diplomatic facilities set ablaze. A U.S. ambassador and three others murdered in Benghazi. The black flag of Salafism, of which al-Qaeda is a prominent element, raised over our embassies in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Sudan.

The administration, staggered and confused, blames it all on a 14-minute trailer for a film no one has seen and may not even exist.

What else can it say? Admit that its doctrinal premises were supremely naive and its policies deeply corrosive to American influence?

Religious provocations are endless. (Ask Salman Rushdie.) Resentment about the five-century decline of the Islamic world is a constant. What’s new — the crucial variable — is the unmistakable sound of a superpower in retreat. Ever since Henry Kissinger flipped Egypt from the Soviet to the American camp in the early 1970s, the United States had dominated the region. No longer.

“It’s time,” declared Obama to wild applause of his convention, “to do some nation-building right here at home.” He’d already announced a strategic pivot from the Middle East to the Pacific. Made possible because “the tide of war is receding.”

Nonsense. From the massacres in Nigeria to the charnel house that is Syria, violence has, if anything, increased. What is receding is Obama’s America. …

… At their convention, Democrats endlessly congratulated themselves on their one foreign policy success: killing Osama bin Laden. A week later, the Salafist flag flies over four American embassies, even as the mob chants, “Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas.”

A foreign policy in epic collapse. And, by the way, Vladimir Putin just expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development from Russia. Another thank you from another recipient of another grand Obama “reset.”

Noemie Emery has more.

… Most of all, he gave the back of his hand to the Iranian dissidents in 2009 who came so close to deposing their leaders, trusting instead in his mythical powers to coax the fanatics in power to reason. Now that he’s failed — and who could have guessed it? — his refusal to stand with Israel in the face of Iran’s threats to destroy it make a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran that much more likely. And when violence broke out on Sept. 11, Obama’s response was to arrest an American citizen who had made a tacky film about Muslims, not much worse than those made about Catholics by many Americans, transgressing the man’s constitutional right to free speech.

Disliked and distrusted by those in his world, he isn’t respected by those in the other, who express their contempt without reservation. A “Barack Obama” with his name and his skin who was in his heart more like Reagan or Kennedy might have won these worlds over.

He wasn’t. He didn’t. He had his chance, and he blew it. And now he should go.

And Mort Zuckerman covers Obama’s domestic debacles.

How do you recover from a recovery? Just how bust the nation’s “recovery” has been is painfully documented in the latest news, just two months before the election. The Census Bureau validated what middle-class Americans know all too well from their week to week, month to month struggle to make ends meet. The typical family is back to where it was in 1995. The analysis of annual data collected by the bureau indicates that median income in 2011 had fallen to $50,054, the fourth straight year of decline in well-being, and that’s adjusted for inflation. In political terms, the Obama administration can truthfully say that the erosion had begun before the president took office, while Mitt Romney can point out that the administration spent four years of fumbling and quite failed to stop the rot.

At the same time we were clobbered by the Census numbers, the latest unemployment report landed with a dull thud: The advance figure for unemployment claims for the week ending September 8 was 382,000, up from the previous week’s revised figure of 367,000. The four-week moving average was 375,000, up 3,250 from the prior week’s average of 371,750.

These are marginal negative movements, but they underline that the recovery touted by the administration has been the weakest in modern history. Nobody is entitled to blow a trumpet because the unemployment rate for August can be headlined at 8.1 percent, down two digits from July’s 8.3 percent. That’s a drop brought about not by more jobs but because 360,000 people left the workforce. It muffles the fact that 5 million people have now been out of work for 27 weeks or more. That’s roughly 40 percent of the unemployed. Another 2.6 million people were marginally attached to the labor force, and over eight million people have given up looking for a job, so they are not counted because they had not searched for work in the prior month. …

John Kass says welcome to stagflation.

… QE3 will not have much of an effect on the real economy, but it will raise inflationary expectations. (It already has, as since June 2012, the implied inflation rate imbedded in TIPS is up by nearly 50 basis points.)

Inflation is taxation without legislation. It is not market-valuation friendly. …

… Economic bellwether FedEx’s (FDX) announced yesterday that the company is reducing its EPS guidance for its May 2013 year from a range between $6.90 and $7.40 to a range between $6.20 and $6.60. …

… demand from Chinese consumers “is not increasing at a significant rate, contrary to everybody’s hopes” and he is “somewhat amused” by observers of China who “completely underestimate” the impact of China’s export slowdown.

Stagflation is at our door.

Obama says he can’t change Washington from inside. David Harsanyi reminds us of 2008 campaign promises.

Today, at a Univision forum President Barack Obama said this: “The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.”

That’s quite the change from what he’s said before, in fact, in many ways it was the core of his argument in 2008.

In 2008, in Bristol, Va., for instance, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised: “We are going to change how Washington works. They will not run our party. They will not run our White House. They will not drown out the views of the American people.”

In the 2008 Obama campaign guide, Blueprint for Change, feel free to turn to the section titled (page 17): “BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN’S PLAN TO CHANGE WASHINGTON.”

Here is again in 2008: “Washington is broken. My whole campaign has been premised from the start on the idea that we have to fundamentally change how Washington works.”

And, at a rally in April 30, 2008, the president said: ”I do not believe change will happen unless we change our politics in Washington.”

The Right Scoop likes Romney’s rapid response to the latest Obama excuse.

Fantastic Romney response to Obama’s claim that he can’t change Washington from the inside, that it can only be changed from the outside. Romney tells the crowd that Obama has already thrown in the white flag of surrender on changing Washington from the inside so we’ll give him a chance to change it from the outside in November. BAM!

Yale prof David Gelernter writes about the election in PowerLine. He writes along the line of Pickerhead’s thoughts which are that Romney will win, but the really discouraging thing is the election is close. What is wrong with this country? The worst president ever and he has a chance? He should be at just 15 percent in the polls; supported by bigoted blacks and fools from the criminal class that makes up the education industry.

… Remember that Obama has demonstrated the competence of Carter with the integrity of Nixon. He has given us persistent unemployment and a pathetic recovery, Obamacare people don’t want, a pipeline project knifed in the back without explanation while money disappears down the great Green sinkhole, a staggering debt and huge yearly deficits, poisoned relations with Congress, an incompetent Department of Justice, states and cities wrestling with financial collapse across the country, schools that keep getting worse—not to mention calamitous security leaks, the Middle East in flames and Iran’s terrorist government closer to nuclear weapons every day.

Carter for all his sanctimonious incompetence had a certain humility.  He announced that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had opened his eyes to the evil of Communism–sad but honest.  And Carter was never suspected of personal corruption.  Of many contenders, the White House leaks will most likely emerge as the biggest Obama scandal.

Romney will win this election.  But the wacko-left Culture Machine won’t fall silent; the schools and colleges won’t suddenly become patriotic, serious, politically neutral.  The entertainment industry won’t discover open-mindedness regarding Judeo-Christianity and the Bible.  Nor will mainstream churches and liberal synagogues suddenly catch on to the moral and spiritual greatness of America. Unless conservatives start taking education and culture seriously, an election day will arrive in which the outcome is never in doubt, because at least 51 percent of the electorate has been trained which way to vote.  At which point the GOP might as well close shop and take the rest of the century off.

Gateway Pundit does a job on the creepy new Obama flag.

… If the image looks familiar it could be because the red stripes resemble the bloody Benghazi hand prints.  The bloodstained walls at the US consulate revealed that the US  officials were dragged to their death by   terrorists. …

James Taranto has more on the flag.

… It seems we have a president who thinks the national symbol is the bald ego. Bier notes that the campaign previously used the “no red states, no blue states” slogan on Twitter, to promote a T-shirt. It shows a colorful map of the 48 contiguous states–well, of some of the 48 contiguous states. Obama’s face blocks Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and South Dakota; almost all of Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota and North Dakota; about half of New Mexico, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming; and the southeast corner of Montana. If his head gets much bigger, it will eclipse the entire country.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes on Islamic faux outrage.

It is a strange and bitter coincidence that the latest eruption of violent Islamic indignation takes place just as Salman Rushdie publishes his new book, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, about his life under the fatwa.

In 23 years not much has changed.

Islam’s rage reared its ugly head again last week. The American ambassador to Libya and three of his staff members were murdered by a raging mob in Benghazi, Libya, possibly under the cover of protests against a film mocking the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

They were killed on the watch of the democratic government they helped to install. This government was either negligent or complicit in their murders. And that forces the U.S. to confront a stark, unwelcome reality.

Until recently, it was completely justifiable to feel sorry for the masses in Libya because they suffered under the thumb of a cruel dictator. But now they are no longer subjects; they are citizens. They have the opportunity to elect a government and build a society of their choice. Will they follow the lead of the Egyptian people and elect a government that stands for ideals diametrically opposed to those upheld by the United States? They might. But if they do, we should not consider them stupid or infantile. We should recognize that they have made a free choice—a choice to reject freedom as the West understands it.

How should American leaders respond? What should they say and do, for example, when a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s newly elected ruling party, demands a formal apology from the United States government and urges that the “madmen” behind the Muhammad video be prosecuted, in violation of the First Amendment? If the U.S. follows the example of Europe over the last two decades, it will bend over backward to avoid further offense. And that would be a grave mistake—for the West no less than for those Muslims struggling to build a brighter future. …

… And the defining characteristic of the Western response? As Rushdie’s memoir makes clear, it is the utterly incoherent tendency to simultaneously defend free speech—and to condemn its results.

I know something about the subject. In 1989, when I was 19, I piously, even gleefully, participated in a rally in Kenya to burn Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. I had never read it.

Later, having fled an arranged marriage to the Netherlands, I broke from fundamentalism. By the time of Sept. 11, 2001, I still considered myself a Muslim, though a passive one; I believed the principles but not the practice. After learning that it was Muslims who had hijacked airplanes and flown them into buildings in New York and Washington, I called for fellow believers to reflect on how our religion could have inspired these atrocious acts. A few months later, I confessed in a television interview that I had been secularized.

The change had consequences. …

… Rushdie felt particularly aggrieved that many of the attacks came from people whose worldview he shared. His leftist credentials were undisputed, given his positions on apartheid, the Palestinian question, racism in Britain, and Margaret Thatcher’s government. What’s more, Rushdie considered himself a friend, not an enemy, of Islam. He believed that his roots in Islam—though his family was not particularly religious—gave him credibility. His previous book, Midnight’s Children, had been a hit in India, Pakistan, and even Iran. He had no clue that Verses would trigger a hostile reaction among Muslims.

How wrong it was to accuse him of provoking those who sought to silence him—and for the British government to urge him to apologize as a way of accommodating Muslim leaders. In the past 23 years, we have learned a lot about the danger of giving in to the demands of extremists. We now know all too well how it incites them to demand more and to refuse reason and a peaceful settlement.

Or at least some of us know it. …

… We must be patient. America needs to empower those individuals and groups who are already disenchanted with political Islam by helping find and develop an alternative. At the heart of that alternative are the ideals of the rule of law and freedom of thought, worship, and expression. For these values there can and should be no apologies, no groveling, no hesitation.

It was Voltaire who once said: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” As Salman Rushdie discovered, as we are reminded again as the Arab street burns, that sentiment is seldom heard in our time. Once I was ready to burn The Satanic Verses. Now I know that his right to publish it was a more sacred thing than any religion.

Jennifer Rubin tracks 15 media certitudes about the Romney campaign.

It is remarkable that anyone pays attention to the mass of pundits, both left and right, who have gotten so much so wrong in this election cycle. You’d think after three or five or even 10 goofs, the pundits would be more sheepish and the readers and viewers more wary.

Here’s a brief recap of some of the media assertions, delivered with great certitude, which proved to be dead wrong.

1. Romneycare would prevent Mitt Romney from getting the nomination.

2. Romneycare would prevent Romney from making an argument against Obamacare.

3. Texas Gov. Rick Perry was a sure thing.

4. The GOP would pick a tea party favorite as its nominee.

5. Romney’s $10,000 “bet” in a primary debate was going to wreck his campaign. …

… You do have to wonder if anything the media have propounded as political wisdom has been right. No one gets everything right in a campaign, but if a pundit or reporter got most of these wrong, why pay any attention?

Here we sit with Romney as the presidential nominee. Ryan energized his ticket, was a hit with the base and has put Wisconsin in play. None of the supposed “gaffes” have changed the course of the race. Romney never released more tax returns than he initially promised. Eastwood’s “empty chair” was a hit with the base. The DNC bounce is gone. One of the most effective arguments the Republicans have made is that Obama took $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare. Obama fell in foreign policy approval in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, and attention is now turned to whether the administration was lying when it said the attacks were spontaneous and all about an anti-Muslim movie.

So when the media mavens on the right and left are in hysterics over Romney’s 47 percent remarks, think how accurate the media’s judgment has been. Consider whether the pundits think everything is a disaster for Romney and just don’t like him.

You might say the biggest inaccuracy the media have come up with is the notion that they matter. They have proved to be more tone deaf and irrelevant than most conservatives even imagined.

Toby Harnden also wonders what the big media Obama fuss in about.

Mitt Romney’s presidential bid has been gleefully portrayed as doomed after a series of supposed stumbles that have delighted Democrats. 

Voters, however, apparently view things rather differently. 

Romney has closed to just one point behind Barack Obama – a drop of six percentage points in a week for the President, according to the latest Gallup tracking poll released on Tuesday. Obama is now on 47 points and Romney 46. 

 

The survey was taken before the current furore over comments made by the Republican nominee in a fundraiser at Boca Raton, Florida in which he said that 47 per cent of Americans were dependent on the government and ‘it’s not my job to worry about these people’.

But the poll, and another by Rasmussen that puts Romney two points ahead, strongly indicate that Obama’s Democratic convention ‘bounce’ has all but evaporated and the 2012 race is wide open. …

Similar thoughts from Jonathan Tobin.

So while some of us were celebrating the Jewish New Year and taking the last couple of days off from politics, it appears a video has more or less decided the election. That’s the assumption of much of the mainstream media about the impact of the release of the video of Mitt Romney speaking back in May at a private fundraiser about the 47 percent of the country that doesn’t pay taxes. They think this means it’s time to put a fork in the Republican candidate. They believe the pile-on from both the Democrats and their media allies will be enough to effectively push Romney far enough behind the president that he will never be able to make it up in the weeks remaining to him. This is, to understate matters, something of a self-fulfilling prophecy since the reason the video is considered to be such a big deal is because it has been covered as an earth-shaking gaffe that ought to spike Romney’s hopes of ever winning the presidency.

As much as I’ve taken a dim view of some of the pie-eyed optimism on the right that wrongly discounted Barack Obama’s advantages, the assumption that Romney has been fatally damaged is incorrect. …

David Harsanyi weighs in too.

All we’ve heard these past two weeks is how much Mitt Romney is “struggling.”

Apparently, he’s struggling to keep President Barack Obama’s poll numbers from falling too quickly. It seems that voters have the temerity not to be particularly interested in what pundits are telling them to think about the race. Obama has dropped six percentage points in a week, allowing Romney to close to within one point of the president, according to the latest Gallup tracking poll released on Tuesday. …

Finally, we here from Andrew Malcolm.

Forget the Republican doom and gloom drumbeat peddled elsewhere in the media this week.

A new Gallup Poll out this morning finds President Obama’s convention bounce fading and the 2012 presidential race reverting to its previous tight margin. What a bummer for the preferred media narrative of recent days!

The poll, of 1,096 registered voters in 12 key swing states, finds Obama and Mitt Romney virtually tied at 48% for the Democrat and 46% for Romney with less than seven weeks to go.

Gallup’s Daily Tracking of registered voters nationally finds the margin even closer with Obama at 47% and Romney at 46%.

The crucial swing states polled were: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. Obama handily won all 12 states over John McCain in 2008, but at this point this time the race is much closer. …

There is disappointment in MA as Brown is dropping in the polls. Seth Mandel fills us in. 

The disconnect between the polls that show Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in a dead heat and the media conventional wisdom desperately pronouncing Obama the easy victor is being turned on its head in the Massachusetts Senate race. There, it is Republican Scott Brown that seems to be running the better campaign, yet the polls are starting to show a consistent lead by his challenger, Elizabeth Warren.

Though Brown’s approval rating is no longer the stratospheric 73 percent it was only last year according to a Democratic committee poll, he is still above water at 55 percent among registered voters and 57 percent among likely voters. A new poll shows Massachusetts voters think Brown is running the more positive campaign, 35 percent to 21 for Warren. And Brown’s strong ties to the state are not lost on voters, nor is Warren’s lack of same; only 13 percent of voters think she has a strong connection to the state. Brown’s approval rating among independents is 67 percent and 30 percent among Democrats. So what’s causing Brown’s poll slide? …

However, the Boston Herald touts a poll that finds Brown in the lead. 

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown has moved into a narrow lead over rival Elizabeth Warren while his standing among Massachusetts voters has improved despite a year-long Democratic assault, a new UMass Lowell/Boston Herald poll shows.

The GOP incumbent is beating Warren by a 50-44 percent margin among registered Bay State voters, a turnaround from the last University of Massachusetts Lowell/Herald poll nine months ago that had the Democratic challenger leading by seven points. Among likely voters, Brown is leading the Harvard Law professor by a 49-45 percent margin, just within the poll’s 5.5 percent margin of error.

“I wasn’t too sure of him at first, but he’s been very independent,” said Jo Ann Dunnigan, a longtime Democrat and President Obama supporter from Fall River who participated in the poll, conducted Sept. 13-17.

Brown and Warren face off Oct. 1 in a debate sponsored by the Herald and UMass Lowell.

The poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, shows nearly one in three Brown backers say they could change their mind before Election Day, compared to just 19 percent for Warren. But the poll, which started a week after the Democratic National Convention, finds no evidence of a “bounce” for Warren.

There also is some troubling news for the well-financed Warren campaign. Despite spending millions of dollars to tarnish Brown’s image, the GOP incumbent’s popularity has actually increased in the past nine months. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

IBD Editors wonder if the president will ever take the job seriously.

The Mideast is in turmoil, the economy is faltering and the president opts to spend precious time with David Letterman, Beyonce and Jay-Z. Are we the only ones to wonder if Obama’s suited to be president?

Last week, Michelle Bachmann had it partly right when she said that “President Obama needs to get his priorities straight.”

There’s no question that Obama should, as Bachmann recommended, cancel his appearance on the Letterman show and agree to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the idea that Obama’s problem is a mixed-up priority list is giving the president more credit than he deserves. Time and again, Obama has proved that he is simply incapable of taking the job of president seriously. And the repercussions of this grow by the day. …

… If all Obama wants to do in life is golf, take fancy vacations, crack jokes on late-night TV and offer meaningless policy proposals, he should go run a nonprofit and leave running the country to someone who’ll take the job seriously.

Jennifer Rubin picks up the theme.

President Obama’s argument for reelection seems to be: 1) the economy is getting better, and 2) if I win I can work with Republicans.

The first argument has been essentially eviscerated by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The Fed doesn’t come up with a super-charged printing press to flood the economy with dollars, push down bond yields and light a fire under the stock market if we are on the right track. QE3 is an emergency response to an economy that is headed for zero growth or contraction.

As for the second, the idea that if Obama is given four more years he could unlock the stalemate in Washington has been dealt a death blow by Bob Woodward’s book, “The Price of Politics.”

The bulk of the book is a step-by-step account of Obama’s unique ability to frustrate, annoy and blindside both Democrats and Republicans throughout the search for a grand bargain to address the debt. By contrast, VP Joe Biden comes across as responsible, digging for spending cuts with Republicans and trying to keep the process on track. (He came up with over $1 trillion in cuts both sides could live with.)

Several aspects of the failed grand bargain negotiations are illuminated: …

… And that really is the powerful message of Woodward’s book. The president doesn’t know what he is doing. He is buffeted by events. He commands neither trust nor respect from either party.

For reasons not clear to me, the Romney campaign has failed to grasp the central thread running through Obama’s presidency, from passivity in the Green Revolution to fumbling a debt deal to insisting the embassy attacks have nothing to do with anything but a movie. In all these instances a vacuum created by non-leadership, confusion and inexperience allowed events to get out of hand. In all these instances the United Sates came out the worse for it. Do we really think a second term would be any different?

So does Andrew Malcolm.

OK, let’s just pull a few things together from recent days:

1) Before a wild protest mob storms the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to remove the Stars and Stripes, the embassy tweets an apology for an anti-Islam video it had nothing to do with but finds no time to defend or explain freedom of speech, even hateful speech.

2) In Libya three days after a warning of upcoming violence, the American ambassador is allowed to go to lawless Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11 with hardly any security where some five dozen terrorists catch them in the bungalow consulate, engage in a prolonged firefight involving rocket-propelled grenades and mortars that just happened to be at hand, resulting in the death of four Americans, including the much-respected ambassador.

3) President Obama expresses appreciation for their sacrifice, urges calm and says some Libyans helped get the dead ambassador to a hospital. He says now after such unanticipated violence on the anniversary of 9/11, he’s ordered U.S. embassy security beefed up in lots of places because you can’t be too careful after four people are dead. He takes no questions.

4) To demonstrate his grief, executive expertise and concern for appearances at such a sad, tragic time,, Obama flies to Vegas for some campaign fundraising.

5) Later, his obedient ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, maintains on four different television shows that the deaths and Cairo riot on 9/11 are all attributed to the anti-Islam video, which has been on YouTube most of the summer, and she knows from her best information they have no connection to 9/11 or terrorism. (Watch those weasel words; her best information could be the worst available.) …

Rubin also covers Woodward’s book as it shows Ryan never had a chance to make a deal because the administration never wanted one.

Unfortunately for the president and the legion of media spinners who insist on portraying the Republicans as the sole problem in reaching a debt reduction deal, Bob Woodward in “The Price of Politics” pretty much points the finger at President Obama. Along the way, to the surprise of some conservatives, he paints a picture of a rather amiable and flexible speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-Ohio) and a dogged Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who, he notes, had been laboring for years on real budget reform and put together the first budget to tackle our entitlement programs.

In Chapters 10 and 11 Woodward gives the ticktock in Obama’s response to Ryan’s 2011 budget that included real Medicare reform. Obama is portrayed as peevish. Rather than wait, for example for the Gang of Six, Woodward reports: “ ‘We’re not waiting,’ the president said in exasperation. He wanted to rip into Ryan’s plan.” So much for trying to reach out to the other side.

Woodward also details Obama’s now-infamous speech on April 13, 2010 at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity, in which — with Ryan sitting in the first row — the president launched into a nasty partisan, assault. …

And Jennifer Rubin defends Ryan from the attack this weekend from Maureen Dowd.

Others have already written on the shockingly anti-Semitic tropes that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd chose to weave into her bizarre attack (“Neocons Slither Back”) on vice-presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and one of his advisers, Dan Senor, who is Jewish. I suppose the left is so drenched in the language of “Israel firster” and “Israel lobby” and images of a hanging Jew, this rhetoric has become a reflexive writing tic, like framing columns as conversations with taxicab drivers.

But for now I’ll turn my attention to the grossly inaccurate portrayal of Ryan as an empty vessel into which neocons supposedly pour their toxic brew. Aside from being grossly insulting that a man seeped in conservative thought, widely read and traveled and a 14-year veteran of the House wouldn’t have his own views it contradicts the other elite line that Romney-Ryan have no foreign policy views at all or they are muddled. …

Elsewhere Dowd has taken a lot of hits for her column. Noah Rothman of MEDIA-ite summarizes.

Long-time New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd is facing a significant backlash over her latest column in which she uses a number of medieval, anti-Semitic stereotypes to describe neoconservatives and, specifically, Dan Senor, a close advisor to Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.

In Dowd’s latest column, Neocons Slither Back, she describes Ryan’s senior advisor as snake-like. Dowd also describes Senor as the “puppet master” behind Ryan’s supposed lurch towards a neoconservative foreign policy critique of President Barack Obama. This, too, is a trope used for centuries to villainize Jews.

Commentary Magazine’s Jonathan Tobin savaged Dowd’s column as “creepy” and says that this episode should not be swept under the rug:

“Dowd’s column marks yet another step down into the pit of hate-mongering that has become all too common at the Times. This is a tipping point that should alarm even the most stalwart liberal Jewish supporters of the president.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, responded immediately to the slurs printed in the Times on the eve of the Jewish new year holiday. In Happy New Year, Puppet Masters, Goldberg goes after Dowd for her liberal use of offensive slurs to attack Ryan.

“Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews,” Goldberg wrote. …

Instapundit notes Romney is compared to Thurston Howell, but Obama is more like Gilligan. Good Photoshop here.

But Obama’s more like Gilligan — the skinny guy with big ears who screws things up every time it looks like they’re going to be rescued. Kinda like he’s done with the economy . . .

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

WSJ finds some adults like George Shultz, Michael Boskin, etc. to outline our dire financial straits.

Sometimes a few facts tell important stories. The American economy now is full of facts that tell stories that you really don’t want, but need, to hear.

Where are we now?

Did you know that annual spending by the federal government now exceeds the 2007 level by about $1 trillion? With a slow economy, revenues are little changed. The result is an unprecedented string of federal budget deficits, $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010, $1.3 trillion in 2011, and another $1.2 trillion on the way this year. The four-year increase in borrowing amounts to $55,000 per U.S. household.

The amount of debt is one thing. The burden of interest payments is another. The Treasury now has a preponderance of its debt issued in very short-term durations, to take advantage of low short-term interest rates. It must frequently refinance this debt which, when added to the current deficit, means Treasury must raise $4 trillion this year alone. So the debt burden will explode when interest rates go up.

The government has to get the money to finance its spending by taxing or borrowing. While it might be tempting to conclude that we can just tax upper-income people, did you know that the U.S. income tax system is already very progressive? The top 1% pay 37% of all income taxes and 50% pay none.

Did you know that, during the last fiscal year, around three-quarters of the deficit was financed by the Federal Reserve? Foreign governments accounted for most of the rest, as American citizens’ and institutions’ purchases and sales netted to about zero. The Fed now owns one in six dollars of the national debt, the largest percentage of GDP in history, larger than even at the end of World War II.

The Fed has effectively replaced the entire interbank money market and large segments of other markets with itself. It determines the interest rate by declaring what it will pay on reserve balances at the Fed without regard for the supply and demand of money. By replacing large decentralized markets with centralized control by a few government officials, the Fed is distorting incentives and interfering with price discovery with unintended economic consequences.

Did you know that the Federal Reserve is now giving money to banks, effectively circumventing the appropriations process? To pay for quantitative easing—the purchase of government debt, mortgage-backed securities, etc.—the Fed credits banks with electronic deposits that are reserve balances at the Federal Reserve. These reserve balances have exploded to $1.5 trillion from $8 billion in September 2008.  …

George Will says some of the FED’s governors are not very happy with current policy.

Fortunately, not everything is up to date in Kansas City. Esther George, president of the regional Federal Reserve Bank here, is refreshingly retrograde regarding what less circumspect people welcome as the modernizing of the nation’s central bank into a central economic planner. She has concerns, both prudential and philosophical, about the transformation of the Fed in ways that erase the distinction between monetary policy, which is the Fed’s proper business, and fiscal policy, which is inherently political.

The basic interest rate — i.e., the federal funds rate minus the inflation rate — was negative during about 40 percent of the disastrous 1970s and the 2000s, which ended disastrously. Because today’s rate is negative, the Fed’s stimulus repertoire is reduced to “quantitative easing.” That phrase, which is how government speaks when trying not to be understood, means printing money. Except printing is so 20th century. Nowadays, the Fed gives banks digital transfusions of money to lower long-term interest rates, which result in . . .

Not much bang for trillions of bucks. With corporations holding upward of $2 trillion in cash, and 30-year mortgages at 3.5 percent, George, speaking several weeks before this week’s meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, asked: “Is there anyone not borrowing today or purchasing a house because interest rates aren’t low enough? Do we expect that businesses will hire if their long-term rates are lower?”

Very low interest rates discourage saving, punish retirees living off interest-bearing assets and, George says, “incent people into riskier assets.” These include commodities, farm land (for the first time on record, prices of cropland in George’s district have risen more than 20 percent for two consecutive years) and equities. …

Glenn Reynolds on the Obama generation of twenty somethings stuck in their parents’ homes.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote in these pages about the way senior citizens are being squeezed by rising costs for food and gasoline on the one hand, and reduced income from abysmally low interest rates on the other.

That “senior squeeze” is real enough, but seniors aren’t the only ones being squeezed. At the other end of the demographic spectrum, young workers are having a dreadful time of it, too. Call that the “junior squeeze.”

Young people younger than 30 are “desperate for jobs,” as their cohort faces the worst unemployment prospects in decades. According to The Atlantic, last months’ jobs report was an awful jobs report for young people because it demonstrated that new jobs just aren’t being created at a sufficient rate to absorb all the young people entering the jobs market from high school and college. Wrote The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann, “In short, there are a lot more young adults still sitting at their computers scrounging around jobs boards for work than there should be at this point in the year.”

There are. And it gets worse. Because of the senior squeeze mentioned earlier, older “gray-collar” workers are staying in, or re-entering, the jobs market to make up for the income they’re losing due to lower interest rates, and to offset higher costs of living. These older workers, because of their already established track records, might be out-competing younger workers even in such entry-level areas as food-service jobs. …

You would think Washington got the message about the mistaken policies of forcing banks to make mortgages to sub-prime risks, but not Eric Holder’s department. WSJ Editors have the story. 

Banks have been widely castigated for causing the housing bust by lending too much to borrowers who couldn’t repay, but now Eric Holder’s Department of Justice has taken its antidiscrimination campaign to new lengths by whacking a bank for having been too prudent.

In a complaint filed Wednesday and settled the same day, Justice claimed that California-based Luther Burbank Savings violated the 1968 Fair Housing Act and 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act by setting a policy that had a “disparate impact” on minorities. Between 2006 and mid-2011, 5.2% of Luther’s single-family residential mortgage loans went to African-Americans and Hispanics, compared to an average of 41.7% for other lenders in the area. The complaint doesn’t cite evidence of intentional discrimination because there wasn’t any. …

Debra Saunders on college affordability.

“No family should have to set aside a college acceptance letter because they don’t have the money,” President Obama told the Democratic National Convention as he accepted his party’s nomination in Charlotte, N.C., this month.

That sentence – key in Obama’s “college affordability” agenda – says everything about this administration’s approach to selling itself to the American voter.

What’s wrong with the message? Let me count the ways.

– It ignores reality. There is no reason a qualified poor kid cannot get into college in the United States simply because of money. Richard J. Vedder, director of Ohio University‘s Center for College Affordability and Productivity, told me that Obama is correct, “people might get an acceptance at a relatively expensive private school that they can’t afford to go to.” But if students are accepted into one college, they can get into another, more affordable college, such as a community college, where Pell Grants cover tuition. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: President Obama says he’ll win reelection if the turnout is anything like it was in 2008. While voters said he’d win reelection if he was anything like he was in 2008.

Fallon: 7-Eleven is trying to predict the election results with blue coffee cups if you support Obama and red cups for Romney. Both will be filled with coffee brewed during the Reagan administration.

Fallon: A South Carolina man says his dog walked 500 miles home after being left in Virginia. His dog responded, “Don’t flatter yourself — I’m just here to get my stuff.”

Fallon: A new survey finds 34% of Americans do not have a Facebook or Twitter account. There’s even a name for these people: “Productive.”

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit reacts to the “interview” of a film maker.

Here’s the key bit: “Just after midnight Saturday morning, authorities descended on the Cerritos home of the man believed to be the filmmaker behind the anti-Muslim movie that has sparked protests and rioting in the Muslim world.”

When taking office, the President does not swear to create jobs. He does not swear to “grow the economy.” He does not swear to institute “fairness.” The only oath the President takes is this one:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

By sending — literally — brownshirted enforcers to engage in — literally — a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration, President Obama violated that oath. You can try to pretty this up (It’s just about possible probation violations! Sure.), or make excuses or draw distinctions, but that’s what’s happened. It is a betrayal of his duties as President, and a disgrace.

He won’t resign, of course. First, the President has the appreciation of free speech that one would expect from a Chicago Machine politician, which is to say, none. Second, he’s not getting any pressure. Indeed, the very press that went crazy over Ari Fleischer’s misrepresented remarks seems far less interested in the actions of an administration that I repeat, literally sent brown-shirted enforcers to launch a midnight knock on a filmmaker’s door.

But Obama’s behavior — and that of his enablers in the press — has laid down a marker for those who are paying attention. By these actions he is, I repeat, unfit to hold office. I hope and expect that the voters will agree in November.

Related thoughts from Ann Althouse:

“That’s a scarf wrapped around his face, not a “towel.” Is the L.A. Times nudging us to think of this man as a “towelhead”? And look at this headline in the Daily Mail: “The man who set the Middle East ablaze hides his face in shame….” Shame? If I were imputing a motivation to this man, I’d say he has a fully justified fear of becoming a recognizable face.

But I think our government is delusional if it thinks the people who are rioting in Africa and killing our diplomats would — if they knew the facts — see individuals like Nakoula as the proper focus of their rage. They don’t believe the necessary premise: freedom as the superior value. As long as they favor a system in which blasphemy is outlawed and severely punished, they will continue to blame the American government for standing back and allowing blasphemy to flourish and flow everywhere. What good does it do to ask them to please understand our system? They hate this system.

Meanwhile, our government would scapegoat a free citizen. It’s not even effectual scapegoating.”

Note Althouse’s strikethrough. You are not “free” when police can come to your door after midnight and demand that you “come downtown and answer a few questions” over a film you’ve made. Voluntarily, of course. . . .

It’s the deputies who should be covering their faces out of shame, but the real shame is on the man at the top of the hierarchy. …

Lee Smith at the Weekly Standard says it wasn’t the film that caused the Mid-East riots.

It was bad enough, two years ago, that Defense Secretary Robert Gates called fringe Florida pastor Terry Jones to ask him not to burn copies of the Koran, or last week, that chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey took his turn to call Jones to ask him to stop publicizing a YouTube video, The Innocence of Muslims. But then on Friday, White House spokesman Jay Carney told the world that the violent protests in Cairo and Ben­ghazi and elsewhere were a “response not to United States policy, and not obviously the administration or the American people,” but were “in response to a video, a film we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting.” Carney repeated the point for emphasis: “This is not a case of protests directed at the United States at large or at U.S. policy, but in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims.”

Carney’s comments lie outside the range of plausible spin, even by Obama administration standards, and if his bosses believe them—as we fear they do—are simply delusional. But they are not without consequence. Nor are Gates’s and Dempsey’s phone calls. They all send the message to America’s enemies that if you kill our diplomats and lay siege to the our embassies, the first move the American government will make is to denounce .  .  . Americans. Our leaders apparently believe that the way to protect Americans from extremists and terrorists abroad is to tell other Americans to shut up.

What’s next? Where does it go from here? There are more than 300 million ways in which Americans expressing themselves might give offense to those who make it their business to be offended. Maybe it’s some other film, maybe it’s a book or even just a tossed-off phrase that our enemies might seize on to galvanize support for their causes. Is the White House going to put every American crank on speed-dial so it can tell them to shut up whenever a mob gathers outside a U.S. embassy or consulate? …

Mark Steyn is on the case.

… When it comes to a flailing, blundering superpower, I am generally wary of ascribing to malevolence what is more often sheer stupidity and incompetence. For example, we’re told that, because the consulate in Benghazi was designated as an “interim facility,” it did not warrant the level of security and protection that, say, an embassy in Scandinavia would have. This seems all too plausible – that security decisions are made not by individual human judgment but according to whichever rule-book sub-clause at the Federal Agency of Bureaucratic Facilities Regulation it happens to fall under. However, the very next day the embassy in Yemen, which is a permanent facility, was also overrun, as was the embassy in Tunisia the day after. Look, these are tough crowds, as the president might say at Caesar’s Palace. But we spend more money on these joints than anybody else, and they’re as easy to overrun as the Belgian Consulate.

As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and Gen. Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the Secretary of State’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen, asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: that’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for 10 hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press. …

… In a rare appearance on a non-showbiz outlet, President Obama, winging it on Telemundo, told his host that Egypt was neither an ally nor an enemy. I can understand why it can be difficult to figure out, but here’s an easy way to tell: Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, said some years ago that America risked being seen as harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. At the Benghazi consulate, the looters stole “sensitive” papers revealing the names of Libyans who’ve cooperated with the United States. Oh, well. As the president would say, obviously our hearts are with you.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the local doctor who fingered bin Laden to the Americans sits in jail. In other words, while America’s clod vice-president staggers around, pimping limply that only Obama had the guts to take the toughest decision anyone’s ever had to take, the poor schlub who actually did have the guts, who actually took the tough decision in a part of the world where taking tough decisions can get you killed, languishes in a cell because Washington would not lift a finger to help him.

Like I said, no novelist would contrast Chris Stevens on the streets of Benghazi and Barack Obama on stage in Vegas. Too crude, too telling, too devastating.

Michael Barone on what causes riots.

In the summer of 1967 I worked as an intern in the office of the mayor of Detroit, and therefore was an eyewitness to the six-day riot that occurred in July and the official response thereto. Things got so bad that at one point I was, improbably, the third person in a meeting between Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and Governor George Romney.

From that experience I drew the following conclusion about why people riot when they do: they riot when they expect other people to do so. You only go out and loot and burn buildings and attack the unfortunate people in your way when you expect that you will have impunity because so many other people will be doing the same thing. The Detroit riot occurred soon after a riot earlier that month in Newark. Riots occurred, as predicted by my theory, in multiple cities after the murder of Martin Luther King in April 1968. After 1968 people stopped expecting riots, and there were none for many years. Rhetoric and news coverage prompted blacks in Los Angeles to expect a riot after the policemen accused of assaulting Rodney King were acquitted by a jury. But that riot lasted only 36 hours, and stopped after Governor Pete Wilson and Mayor Tom Bradley announced they had requested and would bring in 25,000 federal troops—far more than any mayor or governor considered asking for during the riots of the late 1960s. …

Ben Stein with a great essay.

… How I wish that someone that Mr. Obama respects (I have no idea if there is such a person) would look him in the eye and say, “Look, Mr. President, those Muslim terrorists in al Qaeda are not our friends. They have done terrible things to us. They have just done something brand new and horrible to us: they murdered our ambassador to Libya. No matter how much you kiss up to them, they will not be our friends. Maybe you think they’ll be your friends because you have so many Muslim friends in the black community in Chicago.

“But they won’t. They hurt us whenever they can. They are blood brothers to the people who run Iran. THEY ARE NOT REASONABLE PEOPLE. You cannot appease them into peace any more than Chamberlain could appease Hitler.

“The only thing they respect is strength. That’s it. Their guru, Osama bin Laden, put it well. ‘Between a strong horse and a weak horse, people will favor the strong horse.’

“That’s what we have to learn, Mr. President. We have to be the strong horse. Not the buttering up horse. The strong horse. Get it?”

The big problem is that there is no one Mr. Obama really respects to tell him the truth and we will all have to pay for it.