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David Mamet with a note to a “stiff-necked people.”

To those Jews planning to vote for Obama:

Are you prepared to explain to your children not the principles upon which your vote is cast, but its probable effects upon them? 

Irrespective of your endorsement of liberal sentiments, of fairness and “more equal distribution,” will you explain to your children that top-down economic policies will increasingly limit their ability to find challenging and well-paid work, and that the diminution in employment and income will decrease their opportunity to marry and raise children?

Will you explain (as you have observed) that a large part of their incomes will be used to fund programs that they may find immoral, wasteful and/or indeed absurd? And that the bulk of their taxes go to no programs at all, but merely service the debt you entailed on them? 

Will you tell your children that a liberal government will increasingly marginalize, dismiss and weaken the support for and the safety of the Jewish state? …

Mark Steyn compares and contrasts Sandy and Benghazi.

In political terms, Hurricane Sandy and the Benghazi consulate debacle exemplify at home and abroad the fundamental unseriousness of the United States in the Obama era. In the days after Sandy hit, Barack Obama was generally agreed to have performed well. He had himself photographed in the White House Situation Room, nodding thoughtfully to bureaucrats (“John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; David Agnew, Director for Intergovernmental Affairs”) and Tweeted it to his 3.2 million followers. He appeared in New Jersey wearing a bomber jacket rather than a suit to demonstrate that when the going gets tough the tough get out a monogrammed Air Force One bomber jacket. He announced that he’d instructed his officials to answer all calls within 15 minutes because in America “we leave nobody behind.” By doing all this, the president “shows” he “cares” – which is true in the sense that in Benghazi he was willing to leave the entire consulate staff behind, and nobody had their calls answered within seven hours, because presumably he didn’t care. So John Brennan, the Counterterrorism guy, and Tony Blinken, the National Security honcho, briefed the president on the stiff breeze, but on Sept. 11, 2012, when a little counterterrorism was called for, nobody bothered calling the Counterterrorism Security Group, the senior U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, FEMA rumbles on, the “emergency management agency” that manages emergencies, very expensively, rather than preventing them. Late on the night Sandy made landfall, I heard on the local news that my state’s governor had asked the president to declare a federal emergency in every New Hampshire county so that federal funds could be “unlocked.” A quarter-million people in the GraniteState were out of power. It was reported that, beyond our borders, 8 million people in a dozen states were out of power.

But that’s not an “emergency.” No hurricane hit my county. Indeed, no hurricane hit New Hampshire. No hurricane hit “17 states,” the number of states supposedly “affected” by Sandy at its peak. A hurricane hit a few coastal counties of New Jersey, New York and a couple of other states, and that’s it. Everyone else had slightly windier-than-usual wind – and yet they were out of power for days. In a county entirely untouched by Sandy, my office manager had no electricity for a week. Not because of an “emergency” but because of a decrepit and vulnerable above-the-ground electrical distribution system that ought to be a national embarrassment to any developed society. A few weeks ago, I chanced to be in St. Pierre and Miquelon, a French colony of 6,000 people on a couple of treeless rocks in the North Atlantic. Every electric line is underground. Indeed, the droll demoiselle who leads tours of the islands makes a point of amusingly drawing American visitors’ attention to this local feature.

If you’re saying, “Whoa, that sounds expensive,” well, our government is more expensive than any government in history – and we have nothing to show for it. …

Interesting look at our election from Britain’s Telegraph.

… In 2012, Obama is the candidate of the warfare/welfare establishment that has dominated American politics for eighty years. Today, the real revolutionaries are the Tea Party, who have hijacked the Republican Party and turned it into an imperfect (and often reluctant) vehicle for a return to the fundamentals of Americanism: small, constitutional, limited government. To do this, they had to reject the politics of both Obama and Bush – and Mitt has slowly caught up. There was a significant moment in the second debate when a citizen asked Romney how he would distinguish himself from George W Bush. Romney said, “President Bush and I are different people, and these are different times.” He cited differences over aid to small business, balancing the budget, energy policy and relations with China. Remarkably, Obama then jumped in to defend Bush. “George Bush didn’t propose turning Medicare into a voucher,” the Prez said. “George Bush embraced comprehensive immigration reform … George Bush never suggested that we eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood.”

No he didn’t – and that underscores the fact that Romney offers an alternative not only to Obama but also to Bush. He offers an alternative to whole New Deal, big spending, debt hiking, contraception distributing, sexy state circus. And he’s only so radically different because the Tea Party made him that way. Romney went into the primaries branded a moderate and came out branded a conservative. He’s a better, more important candidate for it.

The Romney/Paul ticket seems to have grasped that America simply cannot continue the way it is going. In a globalised world, smaller government is more competitive and more competitive is more beautiful. It is also more concomitant with the American historical tradition. When a US president compels citizens to buy a consumer product – and gets away with it thanks to the Supreme Court – you know that something is amiss in the land of the free. …

Michael Barone makes the call for a Romney win. 

Fundamentals usually prevail in American elections. That’s bad news for Barack Obama. True, Americans want to think well of their presidents and many think it would be bad if Americans were perceived as rejecting the first black president.

But it’s also true that most voters oppose Obama’s major policies and consider unsatisfactory the very sluggish economic recovery — Friday’s jobs report showed an unemployment uptick.

Also, both national and target state polls show that independents, voters who don’t identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, break for Romney.

That might not matter if Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 39 to 32 percent, as they did in the 2008 exit poll. But just about every indicator suggests that Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting — and about their candidate — than they were in 2008, and Democrats are less so.

That’s been apparent in early or absentee voting, in which Democrats trail their 2008 numbers in target states Virginia, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada.

The Obama campaign strategy, from the beginning, has recognized these handicaps, running barrages of early anti-Romney ads in states that Obama carried narrowly. But other states, not so heavily barraged, have come into contention.

Which candidate will get the electoral votes of the target states? I’ll go out on a limb and predict them, in ascending order of 2008 Obama percentages — fully aware that I’m likely to get some wrong. …

WSJ this past weekend with a piece on wildlife making a comeback in our back yards. 

This year, Princeton, N.J., has hired sharpshooters to cull 250 deer from the town’s herd of 550 over the winter. The cost: $58,700. Columbia, S.C., is spending $1 million to rid its drainage systems of beavers and their dams. The 2009 “miracle on the Hudson,” when US Airwaysflight 1549 had to make an emergency landing after its engines ingested Canada geese, saved 155 passengers and crew, but the $60 million A320 Airbus was a complete loss. In the U.S., the total cost of wildlife damage to crops, landscaping and infrastructure now exceeds $28 billion a year ($1.5 billion from deer-vehicle crashes alone), according to Michael Conover of Utah State University, who monitors conflicts between people and wildlife.

Those conflicts often pit neighbor against neighbor. After a small dog in Wheaton, Ill., was mauled by a coyote and had to be euthanized, officials hired a nuisance wildlife mitigation company. Its operator killed four coyotes and got voice-mail death threats. A brick was tossed through a city official’s window, city-council members were peppered with threatening emails and letters, and the FBI was called in. After Princeton began culling deer 12 years ago, someone splattered the mayor’s car with deer innards.

Welcome to the nature wars, in which Americans fight each other over too much of a good thing—expanding wildlife populations produced by our conservation and environmental successes. We now routinely encounter wild birds and animals that our parents and grandparents rarely saw. As their numbers have grown, wild creatures have spread far beyond their historic ranges into new habitats, including ours. It is very likely that in the eastern United States today more people live in closer proximity to more wildlife than anywhere on Earth at any time in history.

In a world full of eco-woes like species extinctions, this should be wonderful news—unless, perhaps, you are one of more than 4,000 drivers who will hit a deer today, or your child’s soccer field is carpeted with goose droppings, or feral cats have turned your bird feeder into a fast-food outlet, or wild turkeys have eaten your newly planted seed corn, or beavers have flooded your driveway, or bears are looting your trash cans. And that’s just the beginning.

In just a few decades we have turned a wildlife comeback miracle into a mess that’s getting messier, and costlier. How did this happen? The simple answer: Forests grew back over the past two centuries, wildlife came back over the past century and people sprawled across the landscape over the past half-century. …

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Jennifer Rubin liked Romney’s speech Friday in Wisconsin.

If Mitt Romney wins Wisconsin, it may be because of the speech. If he loses the election it might be argued it was because he didn’t give that speech at the convention. But whatever the outcome, the speech Romney gave in Wisconsin today was the best written and best delivered of his campaign, probably of his political life.

There were some lovely, memorable flourishes: “The door to a brighter future is there, open, waiting for us. I need your vote, I need your help. Walk with me, walk together. Let us start anew.” “Walk with me” was the grace note, a welcome variation from exhortations to follow politicians. And there was some effective parallel structure (maybe the most compelling rhetorical form when done well):

“You know that if the President is re-elected, he will still be unable to work with the people in Congress. He has ignored them, attacked them, blamed them. The debt ceiling will come up again, and shutdown and default will be threatened, chilling the economy. The President was right when he said he can’t change Washington from the inside. In this case, you can take him at his word.

When I am elected, I will work with Republicans and Democrats in Congress. I will meet regularly with their leaders. I will endeavor to find those good men and women on both sides of the aisle who care more about the country than about the politics. Together, we will put the nation on track to a balanced budget, to reform our tax code, and to finally reaffirm our commitment to financial responsibility.

You know that if the President is re-elected, he will continue his war on coal and oil and natural gas. He will send billions more dollars to his favorite solar and wind companies. And all of this will guarantee higher energy prices at the pump and fewer jobs. Today, gas costs twice what it did when President Obama was elected.” …

Charles Krauthammer explalins Tuesday’s choice.

… An Obama second term means that the movement toward European-style social democracy continues, in part by legislation, in part by executive decree. The American experiment — the more individualistic, energetic, innovative, risk-taking model of democratic governance — continues to recede, yielding to the supervised life of the entitlement state.

If Obama loses, however, his presidency becomes a historical parenthesis, a passing interlude of overreaching hyper-liberalism, rejected by a center-right country that is 80 percent nonliberal.

Should they summon the skill and dexterity, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could guide the country to the restoration of a more austere and modest government with more restrained entitlements and a more equitable and efficient tax code. Those achievements alone would mark a new trajectory — a return to what Reagan started three decades ago.

Every four years we are told that the coming election is the most important of one’s life. This time it might actually be true. At stake is the relation between citizen and state, the very nature of the American social contract.

John Fund wrote the book on voter fraud.

Patrick Moran claims he was just joking about encouraging voter fraud. But he nonetheless resigned last week as field director for the campaign of his father, Virginia Congressman Jim Moran.

Guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe caught Patrick Moran on tape offering advice on how to commit in-person voter fraud. The scheme involved forging utility bills that would satisfy Virginia’s non-photo ID law, and then casting ballots in the name of others — relying on the help of Democratic lawyers stationed at the polls if there were any problems. Some joke.

Last April, a 22-year-old O’Keefe associate showed how easy it is to vote in someone else’s name if no ID is required by being offered the ballot of Attorney General Eric Holder simply by mentioning his name to a Washington, D.C. poll worker. Now O’Keefe has shown just how easy it is to commit in-person voter fraud in states that have loose non-photo ID laws

But opponents of voter ID dismiss worries about our voting system’s vulnerability. The liberal Advancement Project claims “you’re more likely to get hit by lightning than find a case of prosecutorial voter fraud.” I guess the Advancement Project missed these recent lightning strikes: …

According to the Examiner, Doug Wilder is having Obama doubts.

Former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder, America’s first elected black governor, has his own reservations about America’s first black president, Barack Obama.

Wilder, an emphatic Obama supporter in 2008, said his fellow Democrat should have focused more on creating jobs during his first term and faulted the president for failing to keep his campaign promise to bridge the partisan gap in Washington.

“I think he’s governed left of center and didn’t focus on jobs and economic recovery,” Wilder told The Washington Examiner.

But will Wilder still vote for Obama on Tuesday in a battleground state Obama is desperate to win again?

“I have not said anything differently,” Wilder said with a chuckle.

In 2008, Wilder helped Obama become the only Democratic presidential candidate to win Virginia in half a century.

But Wilder said the presidential race in the state remains a tossup this late into the election cycle because many independents feel disappointment in the man they helped put in power four years ago. That has opened the door for Romney to make his case and it has been a compelling one so far, Wilder said. …

Mark Tapscott has the Lee Iacocca story.

… “But the reason we’re supporting Mitt Romney for president is because our entire country faces a critical turning point. The truth of the matter is we can’t afford four more years like the last four years.

“Mitt Romney is the leader with the plan and the experience to lead our nation and restore her strength, which also just happens to be the best thing we could do for America’s automotive industry and the people whose lives depend on this critical industry.”

Go here for the full text.

Whoever wins next Tuesday, Iacocca is likely to give the same advice to them as he did to Chrysler and General Motors in 2009 in an AP dispatch:

“They’re on you day and night. Their oversight is just too extreme. That’s why our 10-year loan, we paid it back in three years. We couldn’t stand the government. The bureaucracy kills you.”

WSJ reviews a book on Thomas Jefferson in his role as slave owner. The Dems might want to re-think their claim of Jefferson as the founder of the beginnings of the Democrat party. Then again, they might be comfortable with the hypocrisy.

… Whatever moral ambivalence he may have felt toward the institution of slavery he overcame when he sat down and did the numbers for Monticello. In 1792, he calculated precisely what his slaves were worth. Mr. Wiencek writes: “What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved children were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest.” To intimates, Jefferson described slavery matter-of-factly as a good investment strategy, advising one friend that if his family had cash to spare, “every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes.”

When it comes to Jefferson the slave owner, Mr. Wiencek’s judgment is unsparing. “His assets reliably compounding, his philosophy rendering him deaf to the appeals of humanity, he plowed through any contradiction,” he writes. “He wielded a species of power that made its own reality.” Mr. Wiencek notes that Jefferson deliberately presented visitors with an idyllic but artificial picture of slave life at his estate. He would point to a few exceptionally industrious slaves who in fact, Mr. Wiencek says, “were desperate to remain in the master’s favor, to stay on the mountaintop”—that is, the part of the estate closest to the house—”and not be sent [to the plantations] below, where the overseers were in charge.” …

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In the Chicago Sun-Times, Steve Huntley writes on how the president erodes the American dream. 

One of President Barack Obama’s latest campaign themes is trust — that he can be trusted and Republican nominee Mitt Romney can’t. Thanks to his own words, we know that Obama can be trusted to put ideology ahead of commonsense economic goals to put people back to work.

In an interview with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, Obama was asked if he regretted his push to enact health-care overhaul legislation when he had huge Democratic majorities in Congress instead of emphasizing measures to fix the economy. “Absolutely not,” responded the president.

That must have come as a slap in the face to the 23 million Americans out of work, trapped in part-time jobs or given up looking for work; to the 50 percent of college grads who can’t find jobs or labor at doing something below their hard-earned college credentials, and to the 5.5 million unemployed women and the 27.5 million women in poverty, increases of, respectively, 500,000 and 3.6 million over the levels when Obama took office. …

David Harsanyi reacts to Obama’s idea of a “Department of Business.”

… But the most obvious pitfall of a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or whatever it’ll be called, is that it would further institutionalize the absurd notion that government can foresee what consumers desire and then “invest” accordingly. When Obama talks about “jobs of the future” he means jobs the government will subsidize because people who vote for him like the sound of it. The more they fail, the more it will have to “invest.” It’s not about what you want, it’s about you need.

If the Obama Administration was an investment house, it would have tanked long ago. Its record on green energy is horrid. It has heaped federal loans and subsidies onto coal-powered electric cars — an “investment” that “will not only reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama said in 2009, but “put Americans back to work.” Hardly. The Chevy Volt’s been a tepid seller, at best, and without taxpayer subsidizes few could afford a $100,000 compact car. Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker has stopped mass production of a new sub-compact iQ plug-in, and offering the public 100 units. Toyota executive Takeshi Uchiyamada recently explained that, “current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society’s needs, whether it may be the distance the cars run, or the costs or how it takes a long time to charge.”

Does government care if ethanol or a windmill meets society’s needs? Does it care about cost? Toyota’s Uchiyamada risks stockholder investments — real investments — while politicians’ decision-making rests on political and ideological pressures. So how could a Department of Business be a good idea?

Debra Saunders thinks Romney can get the job done.

… Romney earned his reputation as a turnaround artist, a venture capitalist and savior of the Olympics. He balanced four state budgets and passed a landmark health care bill with the help of Kennedy, a former rival. Romney has proved that he can get things done, work across the aisle and broker deals.

I asked Martin F. Nolan, former Boston Globe Washington bureau chief, how Romney got along with the BayState’s Democratic leaders. “He didn’t love them, but he talked to them,” quoth Nolan. Romney held regular Monday meetings with the leadership, which is why “you never hear any of them trashing him.”

And he knows how to get a job done.

Nashua, NH’s paper switched this year and supports President Romney. 

Four years ago, with little hesitation, we endorsed then-Sen. Barack Obama to become the 44th president of the United States, saying it was a time for “new leadership, a new approach to governing, a new way of conducting the people’s business.”

So the basic question facing The Telegraph editorial board when it met last week came down to this: Did the former Illinois senator do enough to live up to those admittedly high expectations to warrant a second term?

After several hours of spirited debate, not unlike conversations taking place in kitchens and living rooms across America, we reached a consensus that he had not. Perhaps more importantly, when we identified the key challenges facing the nation – jobs, the economy and the national debt – we concluded he was not the best candidate to meet them.

That person is former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and we hereby endorse him to become the 45th president of the United States. …

Noemie Emery on the two big reasons for Obama’s loss. 

If President Obama loses next Tuesday, we will be tempted to point to two days that did it: Sept. 11, 2012, (riots in Cairo and elsewhere); and Oct. 3, (the first debate). But the real cause may lie in two paths not taken, in which unwise decisions led to bad outcomes.

The first came in January 2010, when Scott Brown, running as the 41st vote to finish Obamacare, won a special election to fill the seat of Ted Kennedy by an unexpected large margin in blue Massachusetts, which had gone overwhelmingly for the Democrats in 2008. This came after the off-year elections in Virginia and in New Jersey. These states, which also had gone for Obama, made large swings to install Republican governors, who campaigned against his ideas. Protests had dogged Democrats at town meetings, polls showed the public despised his proposals, and his approval ratings had fallen dramatically. He had two choices. One was to scale down his health care bill to a few proposals which could have won broad approval, try to win over some centrist Republicans, and have a small but real win he could take to the public. The other, which he chose, was to go big: ram the bill back through the House of Representatives, enrage the people already against him, and add to their number those made as angry by the procedure as others had been by the bill. …

Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom review the book on affirmative action by Sander and Taylor.

The moral arguments against racial preferences in higher education — racial double standards in admissions — have been made once too often. They’re powerful, but we all know them inside out: Affirmative action violates the central principle that all of us should be treated not as members of racial groups, but as individuals, judged by the content of our character. It has long been time to move on, which is precisely what Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. have done in their remarkable new book. They have shifted the focus of the entire debate. Bypassing the standard arguments about core principles, their extensive research focuses on the actual effects of racial preferences on the students they were intended to benefit. Drawing upon data never before available to independent-minded scholars, they find, to their dismay, that such policies actually do more harm than good to black and Hispanic students. From now on, it will be impossible to have a serious debate on this subject without extensive reference to the evidence provided in this volume.

The data are culled from Sander’s research over the past 15 years, and from other recent scholarly investigations. The subtitle conveniently gives us the bottom line: Institutions of higher education admit black and Hispanic students using criteria very different from those applied to white and Asian applicants, and have been killing the former with kindness. These students are thrilled to have been admitted to a highly selective school but quickly discover they cannot cope with the competition from their better-prepared classmates. Thus, they generally do poorly. If their math skills are primitive, they cannot follow a tough economics course. Those who weren’t taught much science in high school are not ready for rigorous pre-med instruction.

These students have plenty of potential for intellectual growth in institutions that are right for them. But a great many of them, alas, are at the wrong schools — “mismatched.” Preferential admissions have enabled them to attend academically rigorous schools for which they are marginally qualified at best. Not only do they fare badly in the classroom at the outset, they fall farther behind with each passing college year. In selective colleges across the land, about half of all black students rank in the bottom fifth of their class. And the gap between them and their white and Asian classmates grows wider over successive years. …