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Andrew Malcolm posts on the “real good talker’s” SOTU speech.

This wasn’t Barack Obama’s first State of the Union rodeo. He didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. He’s been around the block a few times on Capitol Hill. He knows his way around a teleprompter.

Obama used to be known as a Real Good Talker. He made his initial national bones with a speech.

But the last two — his Inauguration and State of the Union — are tired, boilerplate, bits and pieces of campaign rhetoric cut and pasted into recycled collections of empty phrases that sound swell — until you read them. Obama’s top speechwriter, overpaid at the top White House salary of $172K, recently abandoned ship for even better Hollywood dough.

The bad news is we’ve still got 1,437 days of this guy’s gabbing to endure. The good news: Yesterday it was 1,438.

It was stunning last night to hear and then read among the 6,419 words likely the most colossal collection of yawn-inducing clichés in recent American political history.

It was enough to make you pine for those presidents before Woodrow Wilson (and television/radio) who successfully reported the state of the nation to Congress in writing without some six dozen applause lines. …

James Pethokoukis says the administration lacks an entrepreneurship agenda.

Where does President Obama think economic growth and job creation come from? In his State of the Union speech, he said “the true engine of America’s economic growth” was  ”a rising, thriving middle class.” But that’s political rhetoric substituting for economic analysis. Ask most economists, even those working in the Obama White House, and they’ll tell you that innovation-driven productivity is the true engine of prosperity and rising living standards.

And where does Obama think innovation-driven productivity comes from? Judging from his speech, Obama apparently sees government at the prime catalyst and planner – whether its government creating manufacturing hubs or government mandating new rules to spur more energy efficiency or government offering tax credits to spur investment in favored sectors.

And the free enterprise system? Well, entrepreneurs only got a couple of brief shoutouts, once in relation to high-skill immigration. Here’s the other: “Now these initiatives in manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, housing, all these things will help entrepreneurs and small-business owners expand and create new jobs.”

Certainly entrepreneurs could use some help. Consider:

1. Had small business come out of the recession maintaining just the rate of start-ups generated in 2007, according to McKinsey, the US economy would today have almost 2.5 million more jobs than it does.

2. There were fewer new firms formed in 2010 and 2011 than during the Great Recession.

3. The rate of startup jobs during 2010 and 2011, years that were technically in full recovery, were the lowest on record, according to economist Tim Kane of the Hudson Institute.

But Obama only mentioned government as an entrepreneurship enabler, never an obstacle. What would a true pro-entrepreneur agenda look like? The Kaufman Foundation offers several ideas worth considering in its Startup Act for accelerating the growth of startups and young businesses: …

Dana Milbank writes a devastating Bob Menendez column in WaPo titled Bob Menendez; senator of the evening – as in “ladies of the evening.”

Sen. Bob Menendez is embroiled in a prostitution scandal — and it has little if anything to do with sex.

The New Jersey Democrat has for three months been the target of voluminous allegations, all unconfirmed, that he hired prostitutes, one reportedly underage, in the Dominican Republic and other places. Menendez, the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has angrily denied the allegations as they bubbled up into the mainstream media.

But, proving that the political gods do have a sense of humor, the Senate chose this exact moment — as Menendez fights for his political life — to take up two pieces of legislation on human trafficking, including one on child sex trafficking.

“This cuts across party lines, all philosophical lines,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said of his proposal, which is to be voted on Tuesday. “It’s about basic human dignity.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), the legislation’s Democratic co-sponsor, said on the Senate floor Monday that it is “an unacceptable and intolerable fact that sex trafficking is a major source of child exploitation, a major source of damage to our children, and the voices and faces of those children should be before this body.”

The awkward timing of the votes has made matters even more difficult for Menendez, who was slinking about the Capitol on Monday, avoiding reporters and colleagues. The juxtaposition has produced some backroom snickering in the Senate, and Menendez deserves the ridicule — but for reasons unrelated to the claims. Menendez deserves opprobrium, some would argue, because he has acted like a prostitute himself.

There is no evidence that the squat 59-year-old is selling his body, thank heavens. But reporting does suggest that he has been selling his influence and demeaning the body politic. …

Thomas Sowell with a column of random thoughts.

I can’t get excited by the question of whether Senator Robert Menendez had sex with a prostitute in Central America. It is her word against his — and when it comes to a prostitute’s word against a politician’s word, that is too close to call.

If an American citizen went off to join Hitler’s army during World War II, would there have been any question that this alone would make it legal to kill him? Why then is there an uproar about killing an American citizen who has joined terrorist organizations that are at war against the United States today?

Of all the things said during the gun control controversy, one of the most disquieting has been the emphasis on “mental health.” If that ends up letting the guesses of shrinks put more murderers back on the street, the public can be in even greater danger after such a “reform.”

However emotionally similar envy and resentment may seem, their consequences are often very different. Envy may spur some people to efforts to lift themselves up, while resentment is more likely to spur efforts to tear others down.

New York’s Mayor Bloomberg wants to restrict the use of pain-killers in hospitals. Is there any subject on which this man does not consider himself an expert? There are, after all, doctors treating individual patients who currently decide how much pain-killer to use. …

Corner Post says the president has discovered Chicago’s gun problem.

It seems that the president has finally noticed that his hometown of Chicago is a hotbed of gun violence. Consequently, the Chicago Tribune records:

“President Barack Obama will visit Chicago on Friday, when he will discuss gun violence as he focuses on his economic message from Tuesday’s State of the Union address, according to the White House.

Obama will “talk about the gun violence that has tragically affected too many families in communities across Chicago and across the country,” a White House official said in a statement.

The president’s visit answers calls from Chicago anti-violence activists that Obama talk about the recent spate of gun violence in the city, several of the activists said.

“This is an important issue,” said Cathy Cohen, founder of the Black Youth Project, which attracted about 45,000 signatures by Sunday night in an online petition that urges Obama to speak up. “We think of this as a victory for all of us.””

It might strike some as peculiar that the president will be visiting a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the country in order to make the case for stricter gun laws. But not everybody. Chicago’s police superintendent appears not to have noticed the laws, nor their effect on his city’s remarkable crime rate. Per Mediaite: …

WSJ Political Diary posts on the German need to salute someone.

It wasn’t the sort of hanky-panky that usually topples politicians. German Education Minister Annette Schavan announced her resignation on Saturday, nine months after she was first accused of plagiarizing portions of her doctoral dissertation and four days after her degree was revoked. Her thesis, written 33 years ago in the philosophy department at HeinrichHeineUniversity in Düsseldorf, had received a 1, the highest possible grade.

Ms. Schavan is a close personal friend of Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the resignation does serious damage to her government’s credibility. Plagiarism also felled Mrs. Merkel’s former defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who resigned in 2011 when his doctoral thesis was shown to contain instances of copying and unquoted sources on more than 90% of its pages.

But the incidents also show the darker consequences of the German obsession with doctorates. The nobility was abolished after the collapse of the Wilhelmine Empire, in 1918. Since then, academic titles have taken the place of aristocratic ones, conferring vast social and professional cachet. Even in nonacademic settings, holders of doctorates are addressed as “Herr Doktor” or “Frau Doktor.” University professors are “Herr Professor Doktor.” The wife of a Ph.D. is often called “Frau Doktor” even if she doesn’t have an advanced degree herself. Multiple doctorates earn you the right to be “Dr. Dr.”  …

NY Times says an asteroid can do more damage than obama. 

ON Feb. 15, an asteroid designated 2012 DA14 will pass safely within about 17,200 miles of Earth’s surface — closer than the communication satellites that will be broadcasting the news of its arrival. The asteroid is about 150 feet in diameter and has a mass estimated at about 143,000 tons.

Should an object of that size hit Earth, it would cause a blast with the energy equivalent of about 2.4 million tons — or 2.4 megatons — of TNT explosives, more than 180 times the power of the atomic blast that leveled Hiroshima.

It’s almost as if nature is firing a shot across our bow to direct our attention to the vast number of nearby rocky asteroids and a few icy comets that make up what we call the near-Earth object population. We should take the warning seriously.

While no known asteroids or comets represent a worrisome impact threat now, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows more than two dozen asteroids have better than a one in a million chance of smacking into Earth within the next 100 years. That may sound reassuring, but we estimate that less than 10 percent of all near-Earth objects have been discovered. And while we are keeping a vigilant eye out for these objects in the Northern Hemisphere, we are considerably less watchful in the Southern Hemisphere.

It has been only within the last 15 years that astronomers, mostly supported by NASA, have begun discovering the vast number of near-Earth objects. Our findings have led us to the realization that Earth runs its course around the sun in a cosmic shooting gallery — with us as the target. Basketball-size rocky objects enter Earth’s atmosphere daily and Volkswagen-size objects every few months, but they burn up before they hit the ground.

Objects larger than about 100 feet in diameter, the size of a large house, strike Earth with an average interval of a few hundred years. The last one of about this size to hit was on June 30, 1908, in a sparsely populated region of Siberia called Tunguska. The Tunguska blast released about four megatons of energy and leveled millions of trees across 825 square miles. …

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Bill Kristol and Peter Wehner have thoughts about the president’s insouciance during the attack on the Benghazi consulate.

We’ve both had the honor to work in the White House. We’ve seen presidents, vice presidents, chiefs of staff and national security advisers during moments of international crisis. We know that in these moments human beings make mistakes. There are failures of communication and errors of judgment. Perfection certainly isn’t the standard to which policy makers should be held.

But there are standards. If Americans are under attack, presidential attention must be paid. Due diligence must be demonstrated. A president must take care that his administration does everything it can do. On Sept. 11, 2012, as Americans were under attack in Benghazi, Libya, President Obama failed in his basic responsibility as president and commander in chief. In a crisis, the president went AWOL. …

Streetwise Professor has more.

… But obviously the most odious figure in this sorry episode is Obama.  A person (I won’t say “man”) willing to bask in the glory earned by the risks assumed by others, but who retreats to the sanctuary of the West Wing when things get tough. Remember the old expression: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”?  Obama got going, all right, but not in the way that aphorism usually connotes.  He got going in the way Sir Robin got going in Holy Grail.  He ran away, and distanced himself from failure.  He has refused to answer questions about these events, and has acted as if they never even happened: endeavors which a courtier press has enabled.  Worse, he attempted to distract attention from what really happened by pushing the offensive narrative about the Mohammed video.  I am hard pressed indeed to find a historical parallel to Obama’s low, feckless, and unseemly performance.

What happened in Benghazi was a tragedy, and almost certainly a preventable one.  Those who could have prevented it know they could have done so.  How can I say that? Their assiduous efforts to consign the events to the Memory Hole speak volumes.  But Obama’s distancing himself from the situation as soon as the looming catastrophe became manifest, and his refusal even to discuss the issue seriously, let alone admit any culpability, are particularly loathsome.

The title of this post says that Obama was AWOL.  That’s actually a slur on deserters. For most deserters do not hold an elevated and prestigious office, and do not bask in the glory of those who achieve great things under their command, but abscond when things go bad.  The ignominy of desertion is proportional to the elevation of the position deserted.  Obama holds the highest office in the land, meaning that the ignominy of his scurrying to the sanctuary of the West Wing on 9/11/12 is very great indeed.

That’s what our friends think of obama’s indifference. How about a certified liberal? Here’s Richard Cohen in WaPo - The Obama Doctrine – Look the Other Way.

… Obama’s reason for inaction in Syria is so unconvincing that it suggests the election is what prompted him to play it safe. Here, after all, was a president seeking reelection on what amounted to a peace platform: He had ended U.S. combat involvement in Iraq and was winding things down in Afghanistan. How could he justify intervention in Syria? Maybe by saying that the region was about to blow up, that Syria was lousy with chemical weapons, that the Kurds might break away (Kurdistan is the next Palestine), that a sectarian blood bath loomed and that thousands of civilians were in mortal danger. By now, more than 70,000 of them have been killed.

Recently, Obama has been likened to President Dwight Eisenhower. There are, of course, some similarities — there always are — but in one significant way, cited in the book by David A. Nichols (“Eisenhower 1956”), they’re different. In the Suez crisis of 1956, Ike strongly condemned the invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel — three allies — even though some thought it was politically unwise to do so. “I don’t give a damn how the election goes,” he told British Prime Minister Anthony Eden on Election Day itself. His paramount concerns, he said, were the revolution in Hungary and the Suez invasion.

At the moment, it’s impossible to imagine Obama making a comparable statement. (He couldn’t even fully support same-sex marriage until Joe Biden forced the issue, and he was likewise mute about gun control until after the election and the massacre at Newtown, Conn.) His foreign policy has similarly lacked any sense of moral urgency. As a result, the situation in Syria has worsened. It is now becoming a regional catastrophe that will soon enough pull in the United States anyway. Obama purportedly feared making the war worse. By inaction, he has.

As to why the white house deceived us after Benghazi, Ann Althouse says;

Ask Bill Kristol and Peter Wehner in The Wall Street Journal:

“Presumably for two reasons. The first is that the true account of events undercut the president’s claim during the campaign that al Qaeda was severely weakened in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The second is that a true account of what happened in Benghazi that night would have revealed that the president and his top national-security advisers did not treat a lethal attack by Islamic terrorists on Americans as a crisis. The commander in chief not only didn’t convene a meeting in the Situation Room; he didn’t even bother to call his Defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not a single presidential finger was lifted to help Americans under attack.

This is an embarrassment and a disgrace. Is it too much to hope that President Obama is privately ashamed of his inattention and passivity that night?”  

I think he is ashamed. Here’s what I’ve been assuming happened: It looked like our people were overwhelmed and doomed, so there was shock, sadness, and acceptance. But then the fight went on for 7 or 8 hours. The White House folk decided there was nothing to do but accept the inevitable, and then they witnessed a valiant fight which they had done nothing to support. It was always too late to help. It was too late after one hour, then too late after 2 hours, then too late after 3 hours…. When were these people going to die already? After that was all over, how do you explain what you did?

Michael Barone says the weakness shown by our commander in chief is exactly what causes the miscalculations that create wars.

… there are also arguments for aiding the Syrian rebels if, as Obama stated months ago, you want to see the regime of Bashir Assad ousted from power in a country far more strategically located than Libya. And if you want to reduce the bloodshed going on now for more than a year.

Evidently those arguments weren’t persuasive to Obama. On Syria, he chose to lead from very far behind.

“That now looks increasingly like a historic mistake,” writes Walter Russell Mead in his invaluable American Interest blog, and not just because it helps the rebels aligned with Islamic terrorist groups.

“Iran seems much less worried about what this administration might do to it,” Mead writes. “The mullahs seem to believe that faced with a tough decision, the White House blinks.” And, he adds, “both the Israelis and the Sunni Arab states have smelled the same weakness.”

The two disclosures last Thursday came at a time when other presidential actions sent a similar message. One was the withdrawal of one of two aircraft carriers scheduled to patrol the Persian Gulf.

The other was the nomination to be secretary of defense of former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., a longtime opponent of not only military action but also economic sanctions against Iran.

The Hagel nomination was baffling. Most incoming secretaries of defense in the last 40 years have had extensive experience in the Pentagon, at the White House or on the congressional armed services committees.

Hagel has none of these. And, as he admitted at the end of a confirmation hearing when he misstated administration policy, “There are a lot of things I don’t know about.”

“A decade of war is ending,” Barack Obama declared in his second inaugural. His response to Benghazi, his decision on Syria and his nomination of Hagel suggest he thinks he can draw down our forces and avoid military conflict.

But weakness is provocative, and retreat invites attack. Threats abound — Iran, North Korea, China versus Japan. Obama’s moves may end up making war more likely, not less.

Pickerhead has often wondered if the president’s speechwriters and flacks split a gut writing stuff for the narcissist in chief. Jennifer Rubin catches the latest. 

When I saw this, I thought it was a parody of a presidential statement:

“On behalf of Americans everywhere, Michelle and I wish to extend our appreciation and prayers to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. Michelle and I warmly remember our meeting with the Holy Father in 2009, and I have appreciated our work together over these last four years. The Church plays a critical role in the United States and the world, and I wish the best to those who will soon gather to choose His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI’s successor.”

But no, that’s the real thing. To complete the theme, I’m surprised it did not end, “But enough about me, Your Holiness, what do you think of my agenda?”

What is important about the pope and his resignation is not, alas, that Obama met with him. And I am puzzled by the use of the phrase “our work together over these four years.” Did Obama reduce the number of abortions in the United States? No, that can’t be it. Did he reduce poverty here in the United States? Tragically not. (“Poverty has soared under Obama, with the number of Americans in poverty increasing to the highest level in the more than 50 years that the Census Bureau has been tracking poverty. Over the last 5 years, the number in poverty has increased by nearly 31%, to 49.7 million, with the poverty rate climbing by over 30% to 16.1%. Obama has also been the food stamp President, with the number on food stamps increasing during his Administration to an all time record high of 47.7 million, up 80% over the past 5 years.”) Hmm, what about speaking out against Christian persecution? Nope, that couldn’t be it. Ending the mass murder in Syria? Nope. Coming up with an initiative to save lives in Africa? No — that was President George W. Bush. …

Debra Saunders posts on the unintended consequences of San Francisco’s ban on plastic bags.

San Francisco passed America’s “first-in-the-nation” ban on plastic bags in chain grocery stores and drugstores in 2007. In a research paper for the Wharton School Institute for Law and Economics, law professors Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright crunched state and federal data on emergency room admissions and food-borne-illness deaths and figured that the San Francisco ban “led to an increase in infections immediately upon implementation.”

They found a 46 percent rise in food-borne-illness deaths. The bottom line: “Our results suggest that the San Francisco ban led to, conservatively, 5.4 annual additional deaths.”

Is San Francisco’s bag ban a killer? Conceivably, yes, but probably not.

Intuitively, the Wharton findings make sense. The city’s anti-bag laws are designed to drive consumers to reusable bags. Consumer advice types warn people about the dangers of said bags becoming germ incubators. I got this from the TLC website:

“Designate specific bags for meats and fish. Wash these bags regularly – preferably after each shopping trip – to get rid of bacteria. If your bag is fabric, toss it in the washing machine with jeans, and if it’s a plastic material, let it soak in a basin filled with soapy water and either the juice of half a lemon or about a quarter cup of vinegar.”

Ask your friends and family how many of them regularly wash their reusable bags – ask how many folks ever have done any of the above steps – and you can intuit that a ban on plastic bags might not be the brightest idea. …

After looking in on the creeps in the administration, we need some laughs. Andrew Malcolm is loaded up with late night humor.

Leno: A new study finds that people working shorter hours can slow global warming. So President Obama’s economic policy is also his climate policy.

Leno: A new survey finds that 65% say they would not date someone more than $5,000 in debt. Good thing Barack Obama got married before getting elected.

Leno: A leak from a new U.N. scientific study says the Sun plays a far greater role in global warming than previously thought. The Sun and global warming. Always the last place you’d think.

Leno: They predict a huge asteroid will miss Earth Friday possibly by only 17,000 miles. Which is about as close as the Lakers will get to the playoffs.

Leno: Geologists say in 100 million years Asia and America will become one huge continent. So, just as we pay off our debt to China, we are China. One big Wal-Mart. …

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The NY Times says the spirit of barack obama lives in CA school districts.

School officials in Santa Ana were in a bind several years ago: they wanted to build hundreds of new classrooms, but feared that voters would rebel against tax increases to pay for the construction.

So in 2009, the Santa Ana Unified School District borrowed $35 million using an inventive if increasingly controversial method known as capital appreciation bonds, which pushed the cost of the construction on to future taxpayers. Not a cent is owed until 2026. But taxpayers will eventually have to pay $340 million to retire that $35 million debt.

Since 2007, hundreds of school districts and community colleges across California have used capital appreciation bonds to raise nearly $7 billion for various construction projects, according to data from the state treasurer’s office. The bonds have allowed school districts that are short on cash to finance classroom renovations and new athletic facilities while delaying payment for years, or even decades.

But these new facilities often come at an enormous cost to future taxpayers, who will be liable for huge interest payments that sometimes balloon to more than 10 times the amount borrowed over as much as 40 years. By contrast, repayment on traditional school bonds usually costs no more than two to three times what was borrowed.

“It’s the school district version of printing money,” said Bill Lockyer, the state treasurer. “These bonds are bad deals for taxpayers, and they contribute to the general view that the government doesn’t spend their money intelligently.”

In San Diego, property owners owe $630 million on a $164 million bond. For the Folsom Cordova Unified School District, a $514,000 bond will cost $9.1 million.

And in the most expensive case yet, the Poway Unified School District borrowed $105 million to finish modernizing older school buildings, which local property owners will be paying off until four decades from now at an eventual cost of nearly $1 billion. Because payments on the bond do not start for 20 years, current school board members faced little risk of resistance from property owners. …

John Fund posts on voter fraud in Ohio.

… Democrat Melowese Richardson has been an official poll worker for the last quarter century and registered thousands of people to vote last year. She candidly admitted to Cincinnati’s Channel 9 this week that she voted twice in the last election.

This is how Channel 9′s website summarized the case:

According to county documents, Richardson’s absentee ballot was accepted on Nov. 1, 2012 along with her signature. On Nov. 11, she told an official she also voted at a precinct because she was afraid her absentee ballot would not be counted in time.

“There’s absolutely no intent on my part to commit voter fraud,” said Richardson. . . .

The board’s documents also state that Richardson was allegedly disruptive and hid things from other poll workers on Election Day after another female worker reported she was intimidated by Richardson. . . .

During the investigation it was also discovered that her granddaughter, India Richardson, who was a first time voter in the 2012 election, cast two ballots in November.

Richardson insists she has done nothing wrong and promises to contest the charges: “I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States.”

But, of course, as you know there is no voter fraud. Pay no attention to that lightning coming out of Ohio.

Michael Barone says the SOTU speechwriters will try to hide the left wing jerk.

The well-sourced Ron Fournier of National Journal reports that White House aides say they and the president were “stung by the coverage of the inaugural address.” They were evidently surprised that the feisty liberal speech was seen as a feisty liberal speech.

And so, they say, Barack Obama is going to be less partisan in his State of the Union address Tuesday and will talk more about jobs and the economy than about gun control and immigration. Sounds like still another pivot to jobs, which we’ve been hearing about for nearly four years.

This apparent failure to anticipate how others would respond to his words fortifies my suspicion that Obama may be actually sincere in believing that every decent person with common sense would share his views. After all, just about everybody in the places he has chosen to live—Manhattan, Cambridge, the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago—does.

Far from being an instinctive compromiser with respect for those with different views, he seems to be an angry non-compromiser with no idea how decent people could disagree with him.

Byron York says he’s going to pretend he cares about jobs.

White House spinners are working furiously in the final 72 hours before President Obama’s State of the Union speech.  Their job: convince the recession-scarred American public that economic recovery is Obama’s top priority — after everything he has said and done to suggest otherwise.

The unemployment rate is 7.9 percent — one tenth of a point higher than it was when Obama took office in January 2009.  But the true toll of joblessness is far higher.  The Labor Department’s so-called U-6 rate, which includes people who want a job but have become so discouraged they have quit looking, is 14.4 percent.  And a new study, by RutgersUniversity scholars, shows that 23 percent of those surveyed have lost a job sometime in the last four years, while another 11 percent have seen someone in their household lose a job.  That is one-third of the American people who have experienced unemployment during Obama’s time in office, along with many more who have experienced other hardships of the economic downturn.

“Unemployment and what happened in the recession are society-wide experiences,” Rutgers professor Carl Van Horn, a co-author of the report, told me recently.  And indeed, thousands of polls in the last four years have shown that jobs and the economy are the public’s top concern, ranking far above any other issue or set of issues.

Yet in what was likely to be the most-watched speech of his second term, his January 21 inaugural address, Obama ignored the issue of unemployment.  Simply ignored it.  The closest he came to even acknowledging a problem with the economy is when he said, “An economic recovery has begun” — five words out of a 2,100-word speech.  Instead, Obama devoted significant portions of the address to gay marriage, global warming, immigration, and other priorities.

At other times since his re-election last November, Obama has made clear that other issues top his second-term agenda.  In a New Year’s interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Obama was asked to name his top priority for the next few years.  He put immigration reform at the top of the list. “That’s something we should get done,” Obama said.  Economic recovery, Obama added, is “the second thing that we’ve got to do.” …

Speaking of jobs, Joel Kotkin writes about the cities that are growing.

In an era in which many businesses that pay high wages have been shedding jobs, the wide-ranging employment category of professional, scientific and technical services has been a relatively stellar performer, expanding some 15% since 2001. In contrast, employment dropped over 20% in such lucrative fields as manufacturing and information-related businesses (media, telecom providers, software publishing) over the same period, and finance and wholesale trade experienced small declines.

With an average annual wage nearing $90,000, this category — which includes computer consulting and technical services, accounting, engineering and scientific research, as well as legal, management and marketing services  — increasingly shapes the ability of regions to generate higher-wage jobs. In order to determine which metropolitan areas are doing best, Forbes and Praxis Strategy Group compiled rankings based on both long and short-term growth, as well as the extent and growth of each region’s business service economy compared to the national average.

Notably absent from the top 10 are Chicago and the big metropolitan areas of the Northeast and California that have traditionally dominated high-end business services. The only exception is the third-ranked San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metropolitan statistical area, which has logged 21% growth in this sector since 2001, while expanding the proportion of such jobs in the local economy to nearly twice the national average. Over the past year alone the region added 22,000 professional and business services jobs, which was more than a quarter of all new positions during that period.

The continuing vitality of nearby Silicon Valley, and the region’s attraction to educated workers, have made the Bay Area easily the best performer of the nation’s mega-regions. Yet the other leaders on our list are generally smaller, growing metro areas whose expansions have been propelled by a rapid increase in employment in technology and professional management services. These include our top-ranked metro area, Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, Texas, which enjoyed over 46% growth in employment in professional services since 2001;  fourth-place Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and No. 5 Salt Lake City, Utah. These areas have enjoyed strong net-in migration of educated workers, and have poached companies from more expensive regions. …

Amity Shlaes has written a biography of Calvin Coolidge. It is reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. 

‘Debt takes its Toll.’ Thus does Amity Shlaes begin her biography of Calvin Coolidge, the laconic, flinty-faced New Englander who became America’s 30th president upon the death of Warren Harding in 1923 and then captured the office in his own right in 1924. Ms. Shlaes, the author of a best-selling history of the Great Depression, “The Forgotten Man” (2007), issues her debt admonition in the course of introducing Oliver Coolidge, a brother of Silent Cal’s great-grandfather, who went to jail in 1849 because he couldn’t pay a $29.48 debt to a neighbor. She then glides briskly from Oliver’s plight to the problem of government debt, particularly when it reaches proportions that threaten the public fisc and undermine national confidence. “There have been times,” Ms. Shlaes writes in the introduction to “Coolidge,” “when debt pinned down the United States as it once pinned down Oliver.

Calvin Coolidge lived in such a time—as do we. At the end of World War I, the national debt stood at $27 billion, nine times its level before the war. But Coolidge, and Harding as well, slashed the country’s credit obligation to just $17.65 billion. They did it by cutting taxes, generating economic growth and, in the process, flooding federal coffers with surplus dollars. This accomplishment merits attention today, with the national debt exceeding $16 trillion—more than 70% of gross domestic product. If that number hits 90%, some economists warn, it will squeeze the national economy inexorably.

And if that crisis hits, the country will face a binary choice. It can return to a free-market system of lower taxes, smaller government and the curtailment of the Federal Reserve’s promiscuous fiat monetary policies—in short, abandoning Keynesian sensibilities and the trend toward European-style social democratic governance. Or it can opt for what energy-industry executive Jay Zawatsky has called “increasing financial repression”—further federal spending and intrusion into the economy, rising tax rates on the wealthy, ever greater federal debt financed by Fed money creation and, eventually, rising inflation. …

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WSJ Editors come out for Dr. Ben Carson for prez. 

Whether this weekend finds you blowing two feet of snow off the driveway or counting the hours until “Downton Abbey,” make time to watch the video of Dr. Ben Carson speaking to the White House prayer breakfast this week.

Seated in view to his right are Senator Jeff Sessions and President Obama. One doesn’t look happy. You know something’s coming when Dr. Carson says, “It’s not my intention to offend anyone. But it’s hard not to. The PC police are out in force everywhere.”

Dr. Carson tossed over the PC police years ago. Raised by a single mother in inner-city Detroit, he was as he tells it “a horrible student with a horrible temper.” Today he’s director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and probably the most renowned specialist in his field.

Late in his talk he dropped two very un-PC ideas. The first is an unusual case for a flat tax: “What we need to do is come up with something simple. And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe, God, and he’s given us a system. It’s called a tithe. …

More from John Hayward at Human Events.

Dr. Benjamin Carson is a leading pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, where he is a renowned authority on separating Siamese twins.  He was raised in the Detroit inner city by a single mom who worked multiple jobs to get him through school.  He is a professor of neurosurgery, oncology, and plastic surgery as well as pediatrics… and he holds over 50 honorary degrees on top of that.  He’s been the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins since he was just 33 years old.  In 2008, he received America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from George W. Bush.  He and his wife Candy run the Carson Scholars Fund, which hopes to “name a Carson Scholar in every school within the United States.”

He spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast today, ahead of President Obama’s address.  Carson’s 26-minute speech, played in part this afternoon by radio host Rush Limbaugh, is setting the world on fire.  If you haven’t seen or heard Dr. Carson before, and his biography makes him seem intimidating, rest assured he is anything but.  Video is the only way to properly appreciate this speech, both because the good Doctor is a very animated speaker, and because he’s standing right next to Barack Obama when he delivers it.

In the sequester fight, Charles Krauthammer wants the GOP to take a hard line.

For the first time since Election Day, President Obama is on the defensive. That’s because on March 1, automatic spending cuts (“sequestration”) go into effect — $1.2 trillion over 10 years, half from domestic (discretionary) programs, half from defense.

The idea had been proposed and promoted by the White House during the July 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations. The political calculation was that such draconian defense cuts would drive the GOP to offer concessions.

It backfired. The Republicans have offered no concessions. Obama’s bluff is being called and he’s the desperate party. He abhors the domestic cuts. And as commander in chief he must worry about indiscriminate Pentagon cuts that his own defense secretary calls catastrophic.

So Tuesday, Obama urgently called on Congress to head off the sequester with a short-term fix. But instead of offering an alternative $1.2 trillion in cuts, Obama demanded a “balanced approach,” coupling any cuts with new tax increases.

What should the Republicans do? Nothing.

Republicans should explain — message No. 1 — that in the fiscal-cliff deal the president already got major tax hikes with no corresponding spending cuts. Now it is time for a nation $16 trillion in debt to cut spending. That’s balance.

The Republicans finally have leverage. They should use it. Obama capitalized on the automaticity of the expiring Bush tax cuts to get what he wanted at the fiscal cliff — higher tax rates. Republicans now have automaticity on their side. …

Walter Russell Mead peers into our obamacare future.

Britain was rocked this week by one of the biggest scandals in the recent history of its health system—and it just might be a taste of things to come in the U.S.

The scandal surrounds a recent hospital report’s findings that StaffordHospital in Staffordshire ignored even the most basic standards of treatment to disastrous, and disgusting, effect. The NYT has more:

The report, which examined conditions…over a 50-month period between 2005 and 2009, cites example after example of horrific treatment: patients left unbathed and lying in their own urine and excrement; patients left so thirsty that they drank water from vases; patients denied medication, pain relief and food by callous and overworked staff members; patients who contracted infections due to filthy conditions; and patients sent home to die after being given the wrong diagnoses.

As the piece goes on to explain, the hospital’s actions sprung from its single-minded pursuit of cost control. It drastically reduced its operating budget in hopes of qualifying for foundation-trust status, a legal category that would grant it more freedom from central government control. It’s a textbook case of how structural incentives in government-dominated health care systems can lead to terrible outcomes.

Blue model partisans claim that the American health care system is one of the worst in the world in terms of bang for the buck. Many single-payer systems are indeed cheaper than ours, but this is only half the story, and this new report suggests that the other half of the story—quality of care—isn’t always as rosy as official metrics show. And while the American system as it currently exists has plenty of problems, including hospitals and elder care facilities where treatment is scandalously bad, increasing government control of the system is unlikely to make things better.

Expect problems like this to crop up in the U.S. as Obamacare moves us further down the road of wonk-based health care, with well-intentioned, top-down reforms that sow chaos across a complex system.

History of meteorology by The Morning News.

“The water came so fast.” That’s what you always hear, but I never understood what it meant until I watched the East River climb the walls of my apartment building. It’s not fast like a crashing wave or a bursting dam. You’re not dry and then wet. It’s not sudden so much as it’s suddenly lake-like where it had never been that way before. The transformation is so fundamental that you think it’d need days, or at least hours, but it doesn’t. In just minutes, there’s water where there was ground, and then water where there was wall, and then water at the windows and still more water. Water floating cars and billboard-size construction fences, swirling and cold and strong where you walk your dog, where you eat breakfast, where you work. The water’s real speed is its power to remake the familiar as hostile, uninhabitable, or even lethal regardless of planning, preparation, and every other effort. Its real speed is its inevitability.

Eight days before Hurricane Sandy made landfall five miles south of Atlantic City, NJ, I started following it. Over the course of a week, I watched it grow from a low-pressure area known as 99L to Tropical Depression 18 to a full-fledged hurricane with high-speed winds spread across more than 1,100 miles.

I watched it move up the coast and inch along my computer screen and steadily increase the odds that it would make a damaging hit on New York City. I read about it at websites like Weather Underground and AccuWeather. I checked the updates as they came in from the National Weather Service. Words like “unprecedented” and “Frankenstorm” started appearing in the staid prose of meteorology. Days before Sandy hit, it was already “historic,” and I was completely obsessed, which meant a trip to the library.

According to Kristine C. Harper’s Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology, the science of weather forecasting was born on Jan. 9, 1946, at a little after 10:30 a.m. in a conference room in Washington, DC. The head of the U.S. Weather Bureau and a handful of military meteorologists were meeting with Vladimir Zworykin and John von Neumann, two of the most celebrated inventors of the era. …

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In our first Ladies Day for this year, Jennifer Rubin has a few romps. The first is a post on the “second-term-curse.” 

We know many recent presidents fell prey to a second-term curse. Richard Nixon was forced out of office by Watergate. Bill Clinton was impeached. George W. Bush had Hurricane Katrina and then the financial meltdown.

We are barely out of January and all this has occurred: We learned the economy contracted in the 4th quarter of 2012. President Obama is trying to wriggle out of a sequester, which he insisted upon in the 2011 budget negotiations. The Congressional Budget Office says our debt is dangerously increasing. Obama was forced to push Susan Rice aside and should have pushed Chuck Hagel off the boat. Jack Lew is now under scrutiny for ignoring federal law regarding Medicare insolvency warnings. And Benghazi — you remember the story the mainstream media would not cover? — has turned into a debacle. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified today that the president was absent during the Benghazi, Libya, attack(s) and neither he nor Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke to anyone in the White House after briefly telling the president an attack was underway. What?!?

The last item is stunning, in part, because no reporter or debate moderator asked the very simple question many conservative critics were asking (Where was the president?) and because no senior official came forward before the election to say, “Ya know the president wasn’t around.” It is almost like the press and the administration together helped conceal gross irresponsibility by the president until after the election. …

Then Jennifer indulges in schadenfreude covering troubles for Menendez, obama, and Hagel.

… And then we come to Chuck Hagel, the Republican who’s supposed to show how bipartisan the president is and give him cover on huge Pentagon cuts. The dependable soldier was AWOL at the hearing, and instead a clueless bumbler showed up, which did create a tiny bit of bipartisan agreement in the form of amazement that the president wanted such a person around, let alone in charge of our military.

 

Hagel’s confirmation is now hung up, and virtually all Republicans oppose him. On the karma caravan, in the 2012 election Hagel promised now-freshman Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) that he would support her; he then changed his mind and backed loser Bob Kerrey. Today Fischer writes in an op-ed in the Omaha World Herald: “I appreciate Chuck Hagel’s service, both as an infantryman in Vietnam and as a United States senator representing Nebraska. However, after meeting with him privately and witnessing his confusing and contradictory testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, I cannot support his nomination.”

 

So Christie may have the pleasure of replacing Menendez. Bush and Cheney get the last laugh on the war on terror. And Hagel and the faux bipartisan president are getting their heads handed to them. Isn’t politics grand?

And Rubin suggests this weekend is critical for the Hagel nomination.

… Certainly, the stalling on documents is angering Republican senators. On Thursday, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) tweeted his decision: “After disappointing hearing, unanswered questions, failure to comply with transparency requirements I cannot support Hagel.” If Hagel doesn’t pick up more support than the two already committed Republicans, there will be 43 potential “no” votes from Republican senators. And if Hagel continues to snub the committee (one can imagine him coming back with only a fraction of the requested documents), there would be a real risk of filibuster.

The White House insists that everything is on track. But really? Aside from the fact that the same team promised that Hagel would satisfy all concerns and wow everyone in the hearing, the White House isn’t acting like it has a handle on the process. Hagel and his handlers were clearly surprised by the intensity of the hearing questions, and now they are surprised again that the Republicans are pushing for data on Hagel’s foreign connections.

It does seem the weekend is critical. We will see how vigorously (or not) the White House defends Hagel on the Sunday shows; whether any more Republicans publicly announce their opposition or any Democrats show weakness; and, finally, what documents, if any, Hagel coughs up. The weekend also gives the White House, if so inclined, to come up with a Plan B — a qualified, competent nominee who won’t scare the living daylights out of the Senate.

Finally, Ms. Rubin thinks Syrian inaction is catching up to the administration.

… So yes, Obama is a left-wing ideologue domestically and internationally. Sometimes he gets his way. He’s so far to the left and so enamored of retrenchment that he was alone in rejecting more robust action in Syria. Former deputy national security director Elliott Abrams observes:

So, every senior member of the national security agencies–the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the CIA Director, and the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff–favored action. And the president rejected this unanimous recommendation.

That is his prerogative, of course. One cannot escape the conclusion that electoral politics played a role, as The New York Times’s phrasing suggests. That should be remembered, as should the fact of this unanimous recommendation, when next we hear White House explanations of why the United States cannot and should not act. “It’s too risky; we don’t know who to whom to give the training or arms; it might backfire; they don’t need the arms;” the excuses go on and on. But rather a different light is thrown on those excuses when we learn that if the president believed them, none of his top advisers did.

So losing an election, dear conservatives, is not good, especially when it comes to international affairs.

But it’s not the end of America or the end of center-right politics or even the end of conservative reform, especially when there is a GOP House majority and a Senate with no filibuster-proof majority and plenty of skittish red-state Democrats. …

Regarding the president’s lack of courage in Syria. Danielle Pletka says;

… Now, none of this will happen. 80,000+ people are dead. Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups have established a beachhead in Syria. The protracted war and the aftermath are likely to destabilize a NATO ally (Turkey), an Arab leader (Jordan’s Abdullah), Lebanon, Iraq, and the Israeli-Syrian border. The future of Syria post-Assad is in question. And who owns this epic disaster? Barack Obama. Perhaps he should have listened to wiser counsel. Instead, he has searched for less independent thinkers to fill the ranks of his national security team. To paraphrase from the Good Book, it is clear that an unwise man will ignore and refuse learning, and a man without understanding will attain foolish counsel. Indeed.

Debra Saunders highlights the hypocrisy of the drone killings

NBC released a confidential Department of Justice paper Tuesday concluding that our government can authorize the use of drones to kill targeted terrorist leaders, including U.S. citizens abroad. This story bares the dividing line between honest liberals like Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the ACLU and The Chronicle‘s editorial board, all of whom opposed some of the harsher antiterrorism tactics employed both under President George W. Bush and this administration, and rank opportunists like Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, who denounced what they described as civil-liberties violations under Bush but ditched said scruples when they took power.

As a candidate, Obama opposed the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which he called torture, and described GuantanamoBay as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda. In 2009, his attorney general, Eric Holder, reopened criminal investigations of CIA interrogators who had been investigated previously but, for good reason, were not charged.

Yet in the white paper, Holder’s Justice Department signed off on Obama or “an informed high-level official” ordering the death of Americans who pose an “imminent threat” abroad. The paper also loosened the definition of “imminent threat.” …

Peggy Noonan loved one media item from the last week. That was the Paul Harvey commercial for Dodge Ram Trucks that appeared during the Super Bowl. She gagged on another;

… Which gets us to another story involving a media figure and a media institution. I refer to Steve Kroft’s interview, on “60 Minutes,” with Barack Obama and departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That made a big impression too. It didn’t remind us of a style or approach for which we feel nostalgia, but one about which we are feeling increased apprehension, and that is the mainstream media fawn-a-thon toward the current president.

The Kroft interview was a truly scandalous example of the genre. It was so soft, so dazzled, so supportive, so embarrassing. And it was that way from the beginning, when Mr. Kroft breathlessly noted, “The White House granted us 30 minutes.” Granted. Like kings.

What followed was a steady, targeted barrage of softballs. ..

… The entire interview reminded me of an old radio insult: When an interviewer didn’t try to push and probe, didn’t even try to get the story, the resulting interview was called “soft as a sneaker full of puppy excrement.” No, they didn’t say excrement.

We are living in the age of emergency—the economy, the Mideast, North Korea, Iran. The president has an utter and historic inability to forge a relationship with Congress. Unemployment seems intractable.

And the best Steve Kroft and “60 Minutes” could do was how wonderful are you?

The Obama-Clinton relationship is interesting, but here are some questions about it that might have elicited more than outtakes for a Hillary 2016 commercial: …

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Aaron M. Renn in City Journal writes on the growing prosperity of DC and its environs. Truly, this is a host/parasite relationship as Washington grows at the expense of the rest of the country. And, our salvation will be announced by a depression on the Potomac.

The Washington, D.C., region has long been considered recession-proof, thanks to the remorseless expansion of the federal government in good times and bad. Yet it’s only now—as D.C. positively booms while most of the country remains in economic doldrums—that the scale of Washington’s prosperity is becoming clear. Over the past decade, the D.C. area has made stunning economic and demographic progress. Meanwhile, America’s current and former Second Cities, population-wise—Los Angeles and Chicago—are battered and fading in significance. Though Washington still isn’t their match in terms of population, it’s gaining on them in terms of economic power and national importance.

In fact, we’re witnessing the start of Washington’s emergence as America’s new SecondCity. Whether that’s a good thing for America is another question.

Washington is an artificial capital, a city conjured into existence shortly after the Revolutionary War. Its location was the result of political horse-trading. Virginia congressmen agreed to let the federal government assume the states’ war debts, even though Virginia itself was already paid up; in exchange, the new capital would be located in the South.

The city’s early boosters hoped that its location on the Potomac River would help it grow into a commercial as well as a political capital, but that didn’t happen. While other cities got state backing for their business endeavors—a good example is the Erie Canal, built by New YorkState, which benefited New York City enormously—Washington was run by a Congress more interested in national affairs than in local ones. The city stagnated at first. Its growth finally picked up during the Civil War, but it wasn’t until the Great Depression and World War II, with their expansion of the role of the government in American life, that Washington grew prosperous. During the war, average family income there was higher than in New York or Los Angeles.

It was also a heavily black city—by 1957, the country’s first major city with a black majority. But back in the 1870s, Congress, motivated by racist fears of black votes, had replaced the city’s elected mayors with a board of commissioners appointed by the U.S. president. That change, coming just a few years after black males had won the right to vote in Washington local elections, hobbled the city’s ambitions and set the stage for its troubled legacy in race relations. It wasn’t until 1973, when the civil rights movement had made the disenfranchisement of the city’s blacks untenable, that D.C. regained local control. Unfortunately, a number of factors—including the 1968 riots after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination and a series of disastrous urban policies enacted by the federal government—set the stage for the emergence of political opportunists, including the infamous Mayor Marion Barry. During his tenure in the 1980s, unchecked corruption, ineptly delivered city services, soaring crime, horrendous public schools, financial chaos, and racial tensions made the city a byword for dysfunction nationally. So did the 1990 video that caught Barry smoking crack in a hotel room.

Nevertheless, the metropolitan area surrounding Washington continued to grow and thrive. And when the 2000s arrived, the expansion of the federal government not only catapulted the region into a new league of success but also transformed the troubled city at its center.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Washington metropolitan area overachieved on a variety of measurements versus its peer metro areas—that is, the rest of the ten largest metros in the country, plus the San Francisco Bay Area (which federal classifications divide into two, neither of which would make the Top Ten on its own). Among these regions, Washington ranked fourth in population growth from 2000 to 2010, trailing only the three Sunbelt boomtowns of Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston (see “The Texas Growth Machine”). Washington is currently the seventh most populous metropolitan area in America.

The region has performed even more impressively on the jobs front. …

… The city has become, in effect, the Brussels of America. So a wider and wider variety of businesses and organizations must be located there to lobby the government that decides their fate. (According to the Center for Responsive Politics, total spending on lobbying rose from $1.6 billion in 2000 to $3.3 billion in 2011.) These firms pay local taxes. So do their workers, who also buy houses, patronize stores, pay tuition at private schools, employ local doctors and lawyers, and so on. The regulatory superstate is turbocharging Washington’s local economy.

This new basis for prosperity could pay huge dividends to the region. The model here might be the defense industry, which has already centralized many operations in the area. Northrop Grumman, for example, recently moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Washington. Boeing shifted its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago to be closer to defense operations and customers in Washington. Other industries, such as health insurance, may follow suit. Even if they don’t relocate to D.C. entirely, they’ll need to be represented there. City Journal contributing editor Joel Kotkin has speculated that “when everything from zoning [to] the location of industrial plants and healthcare is under Washington’s control, the capital could conceivably even emerge as a challenger to New York’s two century reign as the country’s most important city.” The mere fact that such heresy can be uttered illustrates Washington’s new power.

So Washington can boast demographic and economic growth, a highly educated workforce, an emerging elite-global-city profile, and regulatory hegemony that ensures that America will continue to pay it tribute, even if the federal government manages to restrain its spending. This looks like a winning recipe locally, and it gives the region a legitimate claim to be America’s new SecondCity.

But it’s a loser for America. Even more than the old leaky-bucket system did, the regulatory superstate depends on inflicting pain on the rest of the country, pain that only Washington itself can relieve—if you pay up and have the right connections, that is. Washington’s fortunes and America’s are increasingly at odds. The region is prospering because it’s becoming something that would have horrified the Founders: an imperial capital on the Potomac.

Daniel Henninger on today’s colossal politics. 

Who wouldn’t want to live in Washington? It’s a wonderful world, a place where every problem of life can be reduced to just two words. Gun control. Immigration reform. Climate control. The deficit, which of course can be solved in two words: a “balanced approach.” Things so hard haven’t been so simple since Tinker Bell taught children to fly in “Peter Pan,” also with two words—pixie dust.

Gun control stands out. After the Newtown killings in December, President Obama channeled a national gun-control law through Joe Biden. There was no surprise that he would do so. “If there’s just one life that can be saved,” Mr. Obama said Monday in Minnesota, using standard Washington risk-benefit analysis, “then we have an obligation to try it.”

And so the president will spread gun-control across the land. But consider the discrepancy between the Washington lawgivers and the nation receiving their unitary solutions. Congress has 535 members who work inside the Capitol Building, which you may notice is shaped like a bubble. The rest of the United States consists of 313.9 million individuals spread across a 50-state land mass of more than 9.6 million square miles.

No matter. Mr. Obama’s Washington will try to write a gun law that applies in the same way everywhere for each of the nearly 314 million Americans.

Occasionally Washington looks back at what it has done. In 1993, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act, which created a national background-check system and a list of people forbidden to own a gun: felons, the mentally ill, persons who committed a domestic-violence misdemeanor, drug addicts and the dishonorably discharged. A year later, Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, prohibiting 19 models of semi-automatic assault weapons and limiting ammunition magazines to 10 rounds. In other words, they did then what we intend to do again now.

The Brady Law remains in force, but the Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004. That year, the government formed a panel of specialists at the National Research Council to assess the effects of these gun-control efforts. Its conclusion was that gun-control was a whimper. It said the data on guns and violence “are too weak to support unambiguous conclusions or strong policy statements.”

What they said next is even more pertinent: “Drawing causal inferences is always complicated and, in the behavioral and social sciences, fraught with uncertainty.” Let’s rephrase that. When serious scientists try to solve a problem, they ask, What works? When Washington takes on a problem, it says, Why not? …

John Fund says now the election is over the president can let his inner leftist jerk come out.

The country may be catching on: Barack Obama is our first knee-jerk liberal president. And now that he will never face the voters again, he doesn’t mind showing it.

“There is a deep recognition that he has a short period of time to get a lot done,” says Jennifer Psaki, Obama’s 2012 campaign spokeswoman. So the moderate mask is slipping.

In his second inaugural address, he gave a full-throated defense of the entitlement state and made no mention of reforming Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security before they go bust. He is issuing a stream of executive orders, and he backed the Pentagon’s recently announced plan to lift the ban that kept female soldiers out of combat positions.

Once in a while, Obama still feints to the center. A sharp reaction to his gun-control proposals prompted him to declare that he is sympathetic to gun owners and that he goes skeet shooting “all the time.” The skepticism this boast generated was so rampant that the White House released a photo of Obama holding a shotgun, awkwardly, while skeet shooting. Few people found his claim to enthusiasm for the sport to be credible. Michael Hampton, a top official with the National Skeet Shooting Association, told AP that the photo suggests Obama is a novice shooter. “This isn’t something he’s done very often because of how he’s standing, how he has the gun mounted,” he said.

What is believable is that Obama is showing his true colors. If personnel are policy, there is no better demonstration of his priorities than his second-term appointments. …

Jennifer Rubin says gigantic debt is crushing our economy.

Somewhat overshadowed by the row about the sequester yesterday were the Congressional Budget Office’s very bleak numbers about anticipated debt and the impact on growth. Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Gordon Gray of the conservative American Action Forum observe, “CBO’s baseline confirms that the nation, despite claims to the contrary, remains on a damaging debt pathway.” They observe that debt will remain over 90 percent of gross domestic product for the period 2013-2023, resulting in a drag on growth equal to 1 percent per year. That translates into a total loss of 11 million jobs for that period. Moreover, by 2023 Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will comprise about 64 percent of the budget, “crowding out other federal priorities.”

The obvious solution is to stop spending so much on entitlement programs. The problem is that the president won’t do that, insisting on raising taxes (a trivial amount compared to the debt but nevertheless another drag on an economy that isn’t growing) or cutting relatively small amounts in discretionary funding (the remaining part of the sequester is less than $1 trillion). As the Wall Street editorial board reminds us, “The budget gnomes say the economy will expand by 1.4% in 2013 and 3.6% on average after that. But every year since 2009 CBO has predicted that a new burst of growth is just a year or two away. Perhaps the Panglosses should revisit their optimism as the new taxes corrode work and investment incentives.” …

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School reformer Michelle Rhee tells how she came to support school voucher programs in Washington, DC. 

When I began my stint with the D.C. public schools, I had strong ideas about what education reform should look like and what it shouldn’t look like. I believed wholeheartedly that we had to have a very strong focus on teacher quality. I was also a believer in charter schools. I had seen their value when I served for a couple of years on the board of the St.HOPEPublic Schools. I guess that was my first break with Democratic dogma. I knew that charter schools were anathema to teachers’ unions. I also knew the best ones could serve children extraordinarily well.

But I drew a very deep line in the sand when it came to vouchers. As a lifelong Democrat I was adamantly against vouchers. Vouchers provide public funds to parents who need help in paying tuition for private or parochial schools. Proponents, mostly Republicans, see vouchers as leveling the field and broadening choice for families. Detractors, usually Democrats, decry the use of public funds to pay for private education. I had bought into the arguments that Democrats and others use in opposition to vouchers: vouchers are a way of taking money away from public school systems and putting them into private schools; vouchers help only a handful of the kids; and vouchers take children and resources away from the schools and districts that need those resources the most.

For all of those reasons, my view on vouchers was set. But soon after I arrived in Washington, D.C., I was in a pickle. The District of Columbia had Opportunity Scholarships, a federally funded voucher program that helped poor families attend private schools. The program was up for reauthorization, and there was a heated debate going on in the city.

“You’re the most high-profile education official in the city,” a Washington Post reporter asked. “Do you think the Opportunity Scholarship program should be re-upped?”

My inclination was to say no. As a good Democrat, I should have responded, “I don’t support vouchers, because they are not a systemic solution to the problems we face.” No one would have been surprised or upset with that answer.

However, I wanted to have my facts straight. So I decided to meet with families across the city and spend some time better understanding the Opportunity Scholarships initiative. It’s amazing what one can learn from talking to parents.

The outreach I did about the Opportunity Scholarships was part of a countless number of meetings I had with parents over the course of my time in D.C. Many of those parents were young mothers who came to me looking for answers. Although they were different in many ways, they often came with the same goal: better schooling opportunities for their children. Usually mothers would request meetings with me during the school selection process that takes place each January and February.

The typical mom would come to the meeting armed with data and talking points. For example: …

… After my listening tour of families, and hearing so many parents plead for an immediate solution to their desire for a quality education, I came out in favor of the voucher program. People went nuts. Democrats chastised me for going against the party, but the most vocal detractors were my biggest supporters.

“Michelle, what are you doing?” one education reformer asked. “You are the first opportunity this city has had to fix the system. We believe in you and what you’re trying to do. But you have to give yourself a fighting chance! You need time and money to make your plan work. If during that time children continue fleeing the system on these vouchers, you’ll have less money to implement your reforms. You can’t do this to yourself!”

“Here’s the problem with your thinking,” I’d answer. “My job is not to preserve and defend a system that has been doing wrong by children and families. My job is to make sure that every child in this city attends an excellent school. I don’t care if it’s a charter school, a private school, or a traditional district school. As long as it’s serving kids well, I’m happy. And you should be, too.” …

 

Thomas Sowell with many more examples of how liberal democrats have imprisoned blacks in this country.

There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?

San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city’s total population has grown.

Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.

Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time but most grow up with only one parent today.

Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities. But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count. …

How do homing pigeons find their way around. The Economist reports on new studies that suggest pigeons can hear waves hundreds of miles away.

ON AUGUST 13th 1969, when the rest of the world was watching Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts being showered with ticker tape by the inhabitants of New York, Bill Keeton was releasing homing pigeons from a more rural part of the state, Jersey Hill. This hill is 100km (60 miles) west of Ithaca, the home of CornellUniversity, where Keeton, a bird biologist, worked. Unlike those who launched Apollo 11, however, he had no expectation that his charges would return safely, for that part of the state had long been known as the Birdmuda triangle. Pigeons released there tended to vanish, and Keeton wanted to know why.

August 13th, though, turned out to be both his and the pigeons’ lucky day. All the birds got back to their loft in Ithaca—the only time this happened during years of experiments. Keeton, who died in 1980, never did work out what was special about that particular Wednesday. But his successor Jon Hagstrum, of the United States Geological Survey, has. And the result, which he has just published in Experimental Biology, helps explain how homing pigeons pull off their spectacular feats of navigation.

Keeton knew that pigeons navigate by the sun and by the Earth’s magnetic field. But both of these are as available in upstate New York as anywhere else, so a third factor must be involved. Dr Hagstrum set out to discover what it was.

He had a theory. Pigeons are now known to be able to hear very-low-frequency sound waves, called infrasound, such as are generated by ocean waves. This was information unavailable to Keeton, but Dr Hagstrum suspected it might be the missing part of the puzzle because infrasound can travel thousands of kilometres from its source. …

It’s Andy Malcolm’s weekly dose of late night humor.

Letterman: Women will be in combat now. Finally, someone in the tank who’ll stop and ask for directions.

Conan: Iran has successfully sent a monkey into space. Iran is calling it a huge advancement in not letting women drive.

Conan: Barnes & Noble is closing one-third of its stores because of Internet competition. The CEO said, “Good luck using the bathroom at Amazon.com.”

Conan: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has rejected an increase to the minimum wage. As a result, Christie got a lot of dirty looks today when he went to McDonald’s and Arby’s and Wendy’s and Burger King and Long John Silvers.

Conan: A Secret Service dog died during a fundraiser speech by VP Joe Biden. The dog is being described as “lucky.”

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January 23rd Pickings had an item by James Delingpole of The Telegraph,UK on Germany’s request for its gold. Peter Schiff takes this up in his Gold Letter for this month.

The financial world was shocked this month by a demand from Germany’s Bundesbank to repatriate a large portion of its gold reserves held abroad. By 2020, Germany wants 50% of its total gold reserves back in Frankfurt – including 300 tons from the Federal Reserve. The Bundesbank’s announcement comes just three months after the Fed refused to submit to an audit of its holdings on Germany’s behalf. One cannot help but wonder if the refusal triggered the demand.

Either way, Germany appears to be waking up to a reality for which central banks around the world have been preparing: the dollar is no longer the world’s safe-haven asset and the US government is no longer a trustworthy banker for foreign nations. It looks like their fears are well-grounded, given the Fed’s seeming inability to return what is legally Germany’s gold in a timely manner. Germany is a developed and powerful nation with the second largest gold reserves in the world. If they can’t rely on Washington to keep its promises, who can?

The impact of Germany’s repatriation on the dollar revolves around an unanswered question: why will it take seven years to complete the transfer? 

The popular explanation is that the Fed has already rehypothecated all of its gold holdings in the name of other countries. That is, the same mound of bullion is earmarked as collateral for a host of different lenders. Since the Fed depends on a fractional-reserve banking system for its very existence, it would not come as a surprise that it has become a fractional-reserve bank itself. If so, then perhaps Germany politely asked for a seven-year timeline in order to allow the Fed to save face, and to prevent other depositors from clamoring for their own gold back – a ‘run’ on the Fed.

Now, the Fed can always print more dollars and buy gold on the open market to make up for any shortfall, but such a move could substantially increase the price of gold. The last thing the Fed needs is another gold price spike reminding the world of the dollar’s decline.

None of these theories are substantiated, but no matter how you slice it, Germany’s request for its gold does not bode well for the future of the dollar. In fact, the Bundesbank’s official statements are all you need to confirm the Germans’ waning faith in the US. …

David Harsanyi posts on the negative growth in the GDP. 

So, U.S. consumer confidence unexpectedly plunged in January to its lowest level in more than a year. Then the U.S. economy unexpectedly posted a contraction in the fourth quarter of 2012 — for the first time since the recession — “defying” expectations that any meaningful economic growth is in our future.

If the economy were as vibrant as President Barack Obama has told us it is, a belt tightening in a single sector of government surely wouldn’t be enough to bring about “negative growth.” But one did. Unexpectedly. No worries, though. Pundits on the left tell us that this contraction was good news — possibly the best contraction in the history of all contractions. The White House blamed Republicans and, I kid you not, corporate jet owners because — well, who else? But mostly, the left is bellyaching about the end of temporary military spending and a brutal austerity that’s enveloped a once great nation.

There’s a small problem with that argument. There is no austerity. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Washington spent $908 billion, which was $30 billion more than it spent in the last quarter of 2011 and nearly $100 billion more than it spent in the third quarter of 2012. Taxpayers took on another $400 billion in debt during the quarter. If this is poverty, can you imagine what robust spending looks like?

If we took the argument at face value, though, it means this: The left is contending that George W. Bush’s wars have been propping up the economy for years. They believe that spending, no matter where we “invest,” is tantamount to economic growth — that trillions in deficit spending ostensibly meant to “stimulate” the economy is really meant to artificially inflate the gross domestic product. If this were true, the only question we should have is: Why don’t we spend five times as much and grow the economy fivefold?

Then the unemployment figures get the Harsanyi treatment. 

The unemployment rate is up, the economy has contracted for the first time in three years, yet my Twitter feed keeps telling me the underlying dynamics of the economy are just awesome.

We added 157,000 jobs in January and the unemployment rate ticked up to 7.9 percent. After $7.66 trillion in stimulus spending, a Federal Reserve pumping tens of billions into the economy week after week, we have an unemployment rate that is one tenth of a point higher than the one we had when Barack Obama took office. As Reuters points out, “Economists say employment gains in excess of 250,000 a month over a sustained period are needed.” That stagnation looks something like this: …

Robert Samuelson sees the same numbers and sees the US in danger of becoming Japan.

… The lesson is that huge budget deficits and ultra-low interest rates — the basics of stimulus — have limits and can be self-defeating. To use a well-worn metaphor: Stimulus becomes a narcotic. People feel better for a while, but the effect wears off. The economy then needs a new fix. Too many fixes may spawn new problems (examples: excessive debt, asset “bubbles,” inflation). That’s already happened in Japan.

It’s caught in a trap. On the one hand, it needs stimulus to grow. On the other, the debt from past stimulus measures threatens future growth. About 95 percent of government debt is held by Japanese investors — banks, insurance companies and pensions — that have been patient, report economists Takeo Hoshi and Takatoshi Ito. If investors lose patience and balk at buying government debt, the economy could implode. But their patience presumes that annual deficits will someday shrink. The trouble is that the required tax increases or spending cuts could act as a drag on the economy. Already, the Diet has voted to raise the consumption tax in 2014 and 2015 from 5 percent to 10 percent.

Considering this, Japan isn’t an attractive place for private investment. A declining population reinforces the effect. Katz of the Oriental Economist suggests spurring growth by dismantling protections for sheltered domestic industries. Higher growth would emerge as “inefficient firms die [and are] replaced by better firms.” But Japan’s leaders have generally shunned this complex and contentious approach. Once the present stimulus fades, Katz writes, it’s likely “Japan will fall back to stagnation.”

The United States isn’t Japan. The American economy is more flexible and entrepreneurial. The natural gas and oil boom is a godsend. Housing is reviving. Still, similarities with Japan loom. Growth rates have been stubbornly low. Both countries rely on stimulus policies — cheap credit, big deficits — to cure problems that are fundamentally structural and psychological. The parallels are worrying.

From killer economies to killer pets. NY Times on the cats we love – or not.

For all the adorable images of cats that play the piano, flush the toilet, mew melodiously and find their way back home over hundreds of miles, scientists have identified a shocking new truth: cats are far deadlier than anyone realized.

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes.

Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and an author of the report, said the mortality figures that emerge from the new model “are shockingly high.”

“When we ran the model, we didn’t know what to expect,” said Dr. Marra, who performed the analysis with a colleague, Scott R. Loss, and Tom Will of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “We were absolutely stunned by the results.” The study appeared Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

The findings are the first serious estimate of just how much wildlife America’s vast population of free-roaming domestic cats manages to kill each year. …

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John Miller posts on Mark Steyn’s visit to HillsdaleCollege last week.

Steyn gave his annual public lecture at HillsdaleCollege last night, drawing a crowd of hundreds who braved the bad-weather forecast to hear a worse forecast about America’s future, which of course Steyn made side-splittingly hilarious. I’ve never laughed so hard about doomsday. Here’s how campus reporter Shaun Lichti described it: “Referencing Beyonce, Rutherford B. Hayes, and pole dancers, Steyn weaved a lurid intermixture of humor and political analysis.” That’s about right. Steyn was a bit rough on the poor fellow who wore a red-plaid lumberjack shirt to the event. If you ever go to a Steyn talk, wear something else. Trust me on this. At least the guy got his book signed at the reception afterward.

Best line of the night: “We have looted the future to bribe the present, and at the bottom of the cliff the future is waiting for what we owe it.”

And Mark Steyn is here with more on hapless feckless Hagel.

You don’t have to be that good to fend off a committee of showboating senatorial blowhards. Hillary Clinton demonstrated that a week or so back when she unleashed what’s apparently the last word in withering putdowns: What difference does it make?

Quite a bit of difference, it seems. This week, an oversedated Elmer Fudd showed up at the Senate claiming to be the president’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, and even the kindliest interrogators on the committee couldn’t prevent the poor chap shooting himself in the foot.

Twenty minutes in, Chuck Hagel was all out of appendages.

He warmed up with a little light “misspeaking” on Iran. “I support the president’s strong position on containment,” he declared. Breaking news!

Obama comes clean on Iran! According to Hagel, the administration favors “containment.” I could barely “contain” my excitement! Despite official denials, many of us had long suspected that, lacking any stomach for preventing a nuclear Tehran, Washington would settle for “containing” them. Hagel has been a containment man for years: It worked with the Soviets, so why not with apocalyptic ayatollahs? As he said in a 2007 speech, “The core tenets of George Kennan’s ‘The Long Telegram’ and the strategy of containment remain relevant today.” Recent history of pre-nuclear Iran – authorizing successful mob hits on Salman Rushdie’s publishers and translators, bombing Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, seeding client regimes in Lebanon and Gaza – suggests that these are fellows disinclined to be “contained” even at the best of times. But, even if Iran can be “contained” from nuking Tel Aviv, how do you “contain” Iran’s exercise of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, or “contain” the mullahs’ generosity to states and non-state actors less squeamish about using the technology? How do you “contain” a nuclear Iran from de facto control of Persian Gulf oil, including setting the price and determining the customers?

All fascinating questions, and now that Hagel has announced “containment” as the official administration position, we can all discuss them.

Unfortunately, as Hillary said the other day, “our policy is prevention, not containment”. So five minutes later the handlers discreetly swung into action to “contain” Hagel. “I was just handed a note that I misspoke,” he announced, “that I said I supported the President’s position on containment. If I said that, I meant to say that we don’t have a position on containment.” Hagel’s revised position is that there is no position on containment for him to have a position on.

Carl Levin, the Democrat chair, stepped in to contain further damage. “We do have a position on containment, and that is we do not favor containment,” he clarified. “I just wanted to clarify the clarify.”

Containment? Prevention? What difference does it make? …

… There are over 300 million Americans, and another 20 million Undocumented-Americans about to be fast-tracked down the soi-disant “path to citizenship.” Surely, from this vast talent pool, it should be possible to find someone who’s sufficiently interested in running the planet’s biggest military not to present himself on the world stage as a woozy, unfocused stumblebum. In an exquisite touch, responding to reports that Hagel was “ill-prepared,” someone in the White House leaked that he had been thoroughly “coached.” In other words, don’t blame us: We put him through the federally mandated Confirmation Hearing For Dummies course. He doesn’t have to be a competent Defense Secretary; he just has to play one on TV for a couple of hours. But even that’s too much to ask of an increasingly dysfunctional political system: The Senate disdains to pass a budget, 70 percent of U.S. Treasury debt is bought by the Federal Reserve, month-long negotiations to cut spending turn out in the final deal to increase spending … and the president’s choice of Defense Secretary tells the world he has no idea what our policy on Iran is. …

John Fund on cities with a death wish.

Some major American cities are dying, and the worst part is that these grievously ill patients often are refusing to take even the mildest medicine that would make things better.

Take Detroit, a city that has become a synonym for urban failure. The murder rate of one per 1,719 people last year was more than eleven times the rate in New York City. One contributing factor may be that two-thirds of Detroit’s streetlights are broken.

Once the fourth-largest city in the country, Detroit’s population has dropped by almost 30 percent since 2000 to below 700,000. Its vacant lots cover more land than the entire city of Paris. Despite enormous subsidies from the state government, Detroit is likely to finish the next fiscal year in June a full $50 million in the red. An audit could result in a state takeover of Detroit’s finances, and that could in turn lead to the nation’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy.

With conditions so dire, you’d think the city would grab any life preserver tossed to it. Last year, the state of Michigan offered to take over management of Belle Isle, the 1.5-square-mile island park that sits in the DetroitRiver, just inside the U.S. border with Canada. Now sadly neglected and crumbling, Belle Isle was once an urban jewel designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the creators of New York’s Central Park.

The state offered to manage it as part of a ten-year lease that could be renewed only if both parties agreed. Access to the park, which is connected to Detroit by a bridge, would be controlled by charging $11 for an annual vehicle pass that would also cover admission to every other state-operated park. The state would pump in dollars to repair and upgrade the island’s facilities, saving the city at least $6 million a year in upkeep.

Sounds like a win-win idea, but Detroit’s city council nixed it at a tumultuous meeting on Tuesday night.

The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan Last was in the WSJ with an piece on the decline in US births – sort of a companion piece to the item yesterday on student debt forcing couples to forgo children. 

For more than three decades, Chinese women have been subjected to their country’s brutal one-child policy. Those who try to have more children have been subjected to fines and forced abortions. Their houses have been razed and their husbands fired from their jobs. As a result, Chinese women have a fertility rate of 1.54. Here in America, white, college-educated women—a good proxy for the middle class—have a fertility rate of 1.6. America has its very own one-child policy. And we have chosen it for ourselves.

Forget the debt ceiling. Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the entitlement cliff. Those are all just symptoms. What America really faces is a demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate.

The fertility rate is the number of children an average woman bears over the course of her life. The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America’s total fertility rate is 1.93, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; it hasn’t been above the replacement rate in a sustained way since the early 1970s.

The nation’s falling fertility rate underlies many of our most difficult problems. Once a country’s fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. You get more old people than young people. And eventually, as the bloated cohort of old people dies off, population begins to contract. This dual problem—a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall—has enormous economic, political and cultural consequences.

For two generations we’ve been lectured about the dangers of overpopulation. But the conventional wisdom on this issue is wrong, twice. First, global population growth is slowing to a halt and will begin to shrink within 60 years. Second, as the work of economists Esther Boserups and Julian Simon demonstrated, growing populations lead to increased innovation and conservation. Think about it: Since 1970, commodity prices have continued to fall and America’s environment has become much cleaner and more sustainable—even though our population has increased by more than 50%. Human ingenuity, it turns out, is the most precious resource.

Low-fertility societies don’t innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don’t invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don’t have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.

There has been a great deal of political talk in recent years about whether America, once regarded as the shining city on a hill, is in decline. But decline isn’t about whether Democrats or Republicans hold power; it isn’t about political ideology at all. At its most basic, it’s about the sustainability of human capital. Whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney took the oath of office last month, we would still be declining in the most important sense—demographically. It is what drives everything else.

If our fertility rate were higher—say 2.5, or even 2.2—many of our problems would be a lot more manageable. But our fertility rate isn’t going up any time soon. In fact, it’s probably heading lower. Much lower. …

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Try as they might, unions can’t keep members from voting with their feet once they are free. John Fund has the story.

A couple of network cameras and tripods sat outside the offices of the National Labor Relations Board here on Friday afternoon in the midst of a snowstorm. The NLRB doesn’t usually merit such attention, but it was pushed into the spotlight after Friday’s unanimous decision by a D.C. Court of Appeals panel declaring three of President Obama’s recess appointments to the NLRB unconstitutional.

No one followed the demise of the NLRB appointees with more interest than labor unions. The decision likely means that hundreds of decisions that the five-member board was able to issue only because the unconstitutional members helped meet a quorum requirement are now invalid. Richard Cordray, who was recess-appointed to head the new Consumer Financial Protective Bureau mandated by the Dodd-Frank law, may also now no longer be in office legally and could see all decisions he participated in declared void.

Unions celebrated after helping secure President Obama’s reelection in November, but it’s been all downhill since then. December saw Michigan, the birthplace of industrial unionism in the 1930s, become a right-to-work state, as GOP state legislators became emboldened by the failure of a well-financed union ballot measure that would have cemented pro-union laws into the state’s constitution.

This week the bad news accelerated. On Tuesday, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who had announced her departure on January 9, cleaned out her desk and flew back home to California, leaving the department in the hands of a caretaker deputy — an unusual move, since most cabinet secretaries stay on until a successor is in place.

On Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that during President Obama’s first term, the percentage of workers belonging to unions declined faster than it did during the two terms of President George W. Bush. To be specific, the unionization rate is now 11.2 percent of all workers. Private-sector unionization fell from 6.9 percent to 6.6 percent, and the government unionization rate dropped from 37 percent to 35.9 percent. …

Time to look at the Hagel debacle in the senate. Peter Wehner is first. 

I wanted to second Jonathan’s analysis of yesterday’s testimony by former Senator Chuck Hagel, who is hoping to become America’s 24th secretary of defense. 

It may be that another nominee for a cabinet post has been more inept than Hagel was during his hearing–but if so, I can’t think of who it might be. Mr. Hagel showed himself to be in turn evasive, ignorant, unprincipled, baffled and dim-witted. And those were the high points.

Perhaps the most alarming thing of all is that according to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, Obama found in Hagel a “soul mate.” Woodward went on to say that the president and Hagel should “mind meld” on defense matters.

That the president would find himself so passionately attached to a man of such staggering incompetence is troubling in any case; but for Mr. Obama to want such a man to run the Pentagon is, to me, a genuinely alarming prospect. 

America’s best and bravest deserve to be led by someone far better than Chuck Hagel.

Jennifer Rubin next.

It’s fascinating, actually, to see a nominee of this importance do so poorly. Chuck Hagel, nominated for defense secretary, has gone from awful to atrocious today, having to deny the obvious meaning of words he previously authored (on Global Zero), correct himself repeatedly (no, he didn’t mean Iran’s government was “legitimate”) and find himself simply unable to explain himself. Forgetting about his views, he does not radiate the confidence nor project the intelligence the job demands. It is unclear whether he was not prepped properly, whether he refused to be coached or whether he simply isn’t bright. A long-time Capitol Hill Democrat astounded by the hearing tells me, “It is very clear from the testimony that Sen. Hagel will not be bringing the potato salad to the next Mensa picnic.” …

…Even more damaging was the brilliant — there is no other word for it — interrogation from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) who challenged him to name one senator “intimidated” by the “Jewish lobby” and to name “one dumb thing” the United States did as a result of that intimidation. He couldn’t. Why did he say those things, then? The result of this exchange was to cast Hagel as a gadfly who speaks rashly.

Hagel is sinking his own nomination. Will any Democrats throw up their hands and refuse to pretend he is credible and competent? Maybe. But every single Republican – any fair person not under the thumb of the White House, really – has more than enough reason to oppose and block the nomination. Hagel has proven himself to be a remarkably ill-considered pick. If the Democrats won’t, Republican senators should save the president and the country from an unqualified and unsuited pick. Imagine if this man were sent to Tehran or Jerusalem or Russia on a critical visit? I shudder to think of it.

We will let John Podhoretz have today’s last go at the hapless Hagel. We think he is a fitting compliment to the commander in chief.

… Hagel said many, many things yesterday — incoherent things, confused things, wrong things, untrue things, and things that seemed to contradict other things he had said previously. Some were about Israel, some about Iran, some about American policy.

First he said it was the policy of the Obama administration to “contain” Iran — meaning it will allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon and then try to box it in.

Now, that is exactly what many of us fear is the true policy of the Obama administration, especially in light of Hagel’s appointment.

For not only has Hagel spoken approvingly of engaging with the Iranians, he has his own checkered history when it comes to holding Iran to account. It includes voting against a 2007 resolution that declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps — perhaps the world’s foremost trainer and funder of state-sponsored terrorism — a terrorist organization.

In trying to defend that vote yesterday, he said he had done so (along with newly minted Secretary of State John Kerry) because it was an assault on an “elected, legitimate” government — by which he meant Iran’s theocracy. And because, he said, voting for the resolution would have given the Bush administration a green light to go to war with Iran.

Well, that ludicrous notion is in the past. What’s in the present is that the stated policy of the Obama administration toward the Iranian nuke is “prevention” — that it will not allow Iran to get the bomb, period, and will do what is necessary to ensure it doesn’t happen.

So Hagel corrected himself, kind of: “I was just handed a note that I misspoke — that I said I supported the president’s position on containment. If I said that, I meant to say that we don’t have a position on containment.” Whatever that means.

Later he said he was sorry he’d called the Iranian government elected and legitimate; rather, he should have said it was recognized.

“I don’t understand Iranian politics,” Hagel said — which would be understandable if, say, Khloe Kardashian were testifying. But Hagel is going to be a key official determining US policy toward Iran, and one would hope he’d bring a bit of pre-existing knowledge to the table. …

For years now Pickings has pointed to the disasters that have come from student loans. Christian Science Monitor finds another unintended consequence – low birth rates.

Karen Hu of Oakton, Va., is 28, married, graduated from law school – and thinking about babies. But that’s as far as she and her husband, a software programmer, have gotten: just thinking. What’s holding them back?

For one, Ms. Hu is finding it a challenge to land a good job in the post-recession economy.

For another, her student debt – some $164,000, with a monthly payment of $818 – is forcing the couple to think hard about taking on the additional expenses that come with having a child. “Children just don’t fit into that scenario,” Hu says.

Multiply that tale by tens of thousands of couples and you get the lowest birthrate in US history. American women of childbearing age are having babies at a rate of 63 per 1,000 women – nearly half the peak rate of the baby boom era of the 1950s, the Pew Research Center reported at the end of 2012.

No surprise, recessions typically coincide with a birthrate dip, as financial uncertainty prompts couples to postpone adding new mouths to feed. But the economy is recovering, and there’s no sign yet that the birthrate is rebounding. Some analysts now wonder if the unprecedented scale of early indebtedness stemming from student loans, affecting nearly one-quarter of the overall US populace of childbearing age, has become a permanent deterrent to parenthood.

“This is something that we have not had during earlier recessions,” says Chris Christopher, senior economist at IHS Global Insight, an international consulting group. If college costs keep rising and students continue to borrow heavily to pay for their education, the record-low birthrate may become the “new normal,” he suggests. “This is a real monkey wrench in the works of our families and economy.”

In some respects, the birthrate drop simply follows the century-long demographic glide path to smaller families, measured by fewer children per woman. Many nations in Western Europe, from Spain to Italy to Germany, are further along it, hitting a negative total fertility rate. America might have already hit that point, too, if not for higher immigration and the tendency of immigrant women to have more children than native-born women.

But the economic implications of a shrinking population are worrisome to many economists and political leaders. When the national fertility rate falls below the population replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman – as it has in developed countries including Japan (1.4), Singapore (0.8), Norway (1.7), and Britain (1.9) – long-term plans for productivity and the social safety net become inviable. …

More on student loan problems from Walter Russell Mead.

On Wednesday TransUnion LLC released an alarming report confirming one of our greatest fears: one-third of all student loans are going to subprime borrowers, and many of these loans are beginning to go bad.

The WSJ reports:

“The Chicago-based credit bureau found that 33% of the almost $900 billion in outstanding student loans was held by subprime, or the riskiest, borrowers as of March 2012, up from 31% in 2007. . . . A majority of bank risk managers expect student-loan delinquencies to continue to rise, according to Fair Isaac.

“If you become subprime, it’s more likely that you will not pay your debt,” said TransUnion Vice President Ezra Becker, who oversaw the study.”

Given that the federal government is now responsible for nearly 93 percent of student loans, many are beginning to worry that taxpayers will once again find themselves on the hook for bad loans. And with a fraying job market and ballooning university costs, these loans won’t get any easier to pay off.

Who says there’s no higher ed bubble?

According to American.com, traveling to China is safe as long as you don’t breathe.

In 2008, the U.S. embassy in Beijing (located in the northeastern part of the city’s downtown area) installed an air quality monitoring device that measures concentrations of airborne particles with diameters of less than 2.5 microns. These tiny particles are the main cause of health problems after long-term exposure, and their monitoring provides a much better appreciation of health risks than the measurement of large (10 microns and above) particles. The Chinese authorities began to release their own measurements of smaller particles only in January 2013, but the tweeting of the hourly concentrations by the American embassy has been a perfect example of subversive information  — although the city’s citizens have always known, without having the actual numbers, that they are breathing a grossly polluted air.

At 8 p.m. on January 12, 2013, the American device registered 886 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3). To people unfamiliar with air pollution monitoring that is just a number, moreover one given in units not commonly used in the United States. Precisely for that reason, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency developed an air quality index (AQI) that converts those measures into readily comprehensible numbers.

An AQI less than 50 means good air quality; 51–100 indicates moderately polluted air; 101–150 is considered unhealthy for adults with lung diseases; at “generally unhealthy” 151–200, everybody should reduce any prolonged outdoor exercise; at “very unhealthy” 201–300, adults with heart and lung diseases, the elderly, and children should avoid any outdoor physical activity; and when the index goes beyond 300 and all the way to 500, the best choice is to stay inside.

The peak concentration of 886 μg/m3 reached on January 12 translates to an AQI of 755, far beyond the defined scale. Beijing’s AQI rose above 500 by 2 a.m. on January 13 and remained above that level until 6 a.m. the next day.

Perhaps the best way to indicate how extraordinarily high such levels are is to note that regular monitoring at nearly 650 sites in the United States showed a mean concentration of 10 μg/m3 (AQI 32), with 10 percent of sites having levels below 7 and only 10 percent of places having concentrations above 13 μg/m3 (AQI 42). Peak Beijing levels on January 12 were thus nearly 90 times the U.S. mean, and even the city’s common winter levels of 250–350 μg/m3 are 25–35 times the U.S. mean.

High air pollution levels require a combination of two factors: high emissions and a limited mixing layer (the thickness of the atmosphere available for the dilution of airborne pollution). The first has been a Chinese constant, the second is bound to happen again and again during winter, when thermal inversion makes the atmosphere colder near the ground and hence limits the depth of the mixed layer, often to just a few hundred meters. As long as these inversions persist (sometimes just for a few hours, sometimes for several days) the near-ground concentration of pollutants soars. …