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Charles Krauthammer, who coined the term Bush Derangement Syndrome, spots another disorder.
…Opening a whole new branch of cognitive science — liberal psychology — Obama has discovered a new principle: The fearful brain is hard-wired to act befuddled, i.e., vote Republican.
…I have a better explanation. Better because it adheres to the ultimate scientific principle, Occam’s Razor, by which the preferred explanation for any phenomenon is the one with the most economy and simplicity. And there is nothing simpler than the Gallup findings on the ideological inclinations of the American people. Conservative: 42 percent. Moderate: 35 percent. Liberal: 20 percent. No fanciful new syndromes or other elaborate fictions are required to understand that if you try to impose a liberal agenda on such a demonstrably center-right country — a country that is 80 percent non-liberal — you get a massive backlash.
Moreover, apart from ideology is empirical reality. Even as we speak, the social-democratic model Obama is openly and boldly trying to move America toward is unraveling in Europe. …
… Hence their opposition to Obama’s proudly transformational New Foundation agenda. Their logic is impeccable: Only the most blinkered intellectual could be attempting to introduce social democracy to America precisely when the world’s foremost exemplar of that model — Europe — is in chaotic meltdown. …
David Harsanyi points to some of the questionable judgments and opinions on the Right. Particularly disappointing is the moralizing. Republicans supposedly want less government intrusion in our lives, but then bring up issues in which the government should not be involved. The Left wishes to convert everyone to socialism, and some on the Right wish to convert everyone to fundamentalist Christianity. Neither are appropriate uses of government power. Harsanyi makes the important point that the Left has been more successful in circumventing the Constitution and the will of the people to achieve their goals, to the detriment of the society and the economy.
…Do I wish that science-challenged believers would resist the urge to raise their hands when asked if they believe the world is 5,000 years old? God, yes. But an election offers limited choices. Take Delaware, where voters can pick a candidate who had a youthful flirtation with witchcraft or one who dabbled in collectivist economic theory.
Only one of these faiths has gained traction in Washington the past few years. And as far as I can tell, there is no pagan lobby.
Do I wish that Colorado senatorial candidate Ken Buck hadn’t declared that being gay was a choice (as if there’s something wrong with choosing to be gay)? Yes. Do I wish he hadn’t followed up by comparing a gay genetic predisposition with alcoholism? I do. If you were brainy enough to watch “Meet the Press” instead of wasting time in church last Sunday, no doubt you cringed at this primitive lunacy.
After all, what’s more consequential than a faux pas about nature and/or nurture? Who cares that Democrat Michael Bennet was busy moralizing about the cosmic benefits of dubious economic theory and science fiction environmentalism — ideas that have already cost us trillions with nothing to show for it? …
Tunku Varadarajan comments on how the political waffling at the White House continues, this time regarding a visit to a Sikh temple.
Barack Obama has become a Sikh joke. The 44th president of the United States, a man who offered himself up to the world as the cosmopolitan alternative to the Little Americanism of the Bush years, has dropped plans to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar—the Vatican, as it were, of the Sikh religion—on his state visit to India in early November. As The New York Times reports, the president would have had to cover his head with a knotted handkerchief on his visit to the shrine, in keeping with Sikh religious tradition, so the White House invertebrates scuttled plans to go there out of fear that images of Obama with a cloth on his head would reignite rumors that he is a Muslim.
…And now, instead of leading on the issue of religious tolerance by beaming for the cameras in Amritsar, Sikh handkerchief firmly on head, he has backed away. Note that the trip to India will be after the midterm elections, so he can’t be worried about the adverse impact of Amritsar images on his party’s performance. He is worried, instead, about his own image. (That said, the 250,000 Sikhs who live in California are surely, now, looking at Carly and Meg with a new enthusiasm.)
Americans are much, much better than their political leaders ever give them credit for. The overwhelming majority of Sikhs in the U.S. go to work every day without harassment from their neighbors and colleagues. You can focus on a few stray incidents of violence against Sikhs after 9/11, but why ignore the fact that 99.9 percent of them have suffered no problems; Americans, overwhelmingly, are decent people. Sikhs have done marvelously well in Wall Street, with their turbans on. They serve in the U.S. Army, with their turbans on. …
In the LA Times, Andrew Malcolm reviews the latest Gallup poll on the prez.
…The new survey reveals that the more Americans get to know this guy, the less they like him. His …
… approval rating has gone down every single quarter since that sunny promising inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009.
…Latest Gallup numbers also show that on the first day of his 22nd month in office, for the first time more Americans view Obama unfavorably than favorably, 50% to 47%, his lowest favorable rating yet.
…According to Gallup’s results, 39% of Americans now believe Obama deserves a second term.
Unfortunately for him, 54% believe he does not deserve a second chance at change. …
Thomas Sowell criticizes Congressman Barney Frank for helping create the housing bubble and bust. The road to recession may have been paved with some good intentions, but Congress didn’t know what they were doing when they intervened in the housing market, and now they won’t own up to the financial disaster they created.
…No one contributed more to the policies behind the housing boom and bust, which led to the economic disaster we are now in, than Congressman Barney Frank.
His powerful position on the House of Representatives’ Committee on Financial Services gave him leverage to force through legislation and policies which pressured banks and other lenders to grant mortgage loans to people who would not qualify under the standards which had long prevailed, and had long made mortgage loans among the safest investments around.
…To those who warned of the risks in the new policies, Congressman Frank replied in 2003 that critics “exaggerate a threat of safety” and “conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see.” …
With the federal regulators leaning on banks to make more loans to people who did not meet traditional qualifications — the “underserved population” in political Newspeak — and quotas being given to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy more of these riskier mortgages from the original lenders, critics pointed out the dangers in these pressures to meet arbitrary home ownership goals. But Barney Frank counter-attacked against these critics.
…Fast forward now to 2008, after the risky mortgages had led to huge numbers of defaults, dragging down Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the financial markets in general — and with them the whole economy.
Barney Frank was all over the media, pointing the finger of blame at everybody else. When financial analyst Maria Bartiromo asked Congressman Frank who was responsible for the financial crisis, he said, “right-wing Republicans.” It so happens that conservatives were the loudest critics who had warned for years against the policies that Barney Frank pushed, but why let facts get in the way? …
Thomas Sowell has more on Barney Frank’s actions that led to the mortgage meltdown.
Having been a key figure in promoting the risky mortgage lending practices imposed by the federal government on lenders, and on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy these risky mortgages from the lenders, Barney Frank blamed the resulting collapse of financial markets and the economy on everybody except Barney Frank.
…When federal regulators uncovered irregularities in Fannie Mae’s accounting, and in 2004 issued what Barron’s magazine called “a blistering 211-page report,” Barney Frank lashed out — not at Fannie Mae, but at the regulators who uncovered Fannie Mae’s misdeeds. He said “a leadership change” in the regulatory agency was “overdue.”
Politicians who say we need more regulation almost never mean regulation in the sense of impartially enforcing explicit rules, such as the accounting rules that Fannie Mae was violating to cover up its own risks. They mean regulation with arbitrary powers, such as those under the Community Reinvestment Act, which enable regulators to carry out the agendas that politicians give them.
…A reining in of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be a reining in of Barney Frank’s power. But he can’t stop the voters from reining in his power, unless he can once more get by this election year with pious rhetoric to conceal his cynical actions.
In the WaPo, Charles Murray takes an anthropologist’s view of the New Elite.
The tea party appears to be of one mind on at least one thing: America has been taken over by a New Elite.
“On one side, we have the elites,” Fox News host Glenn Beck explained last month, “and the other side, we have the regular people.” The elites are “no longer in touch with what the country is really thinking,” Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle complained this summer. And when Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell recently began a campaign ad by saying, “I didn’t go to Yale,” she could be confident that her supporters would approve.
…There so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They probably haven’t ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (college doesn’t count) or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (gentrifying neighborhoods don’t count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn’t count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian. They are unlikely to have even visited a factory floor, let alone worked on one.
Taken individually, members of the New Elite are isolated from mainstream America as a result of lifestyle choices that are nobody’s business but their own. But add them all up, and they mean that the New Elite lives in a world that doesn’t intersect with mainstream America in many important ways. When the tea party says the New Elite doesn’t get America, there is some truth in the accusation. …
Toby Harnden breaks down the Senate races, in the Telegraph, UK.
With two weeks until election night, a lot of Senate races appear to be tightening. The Republicans need to gain 10 seats to win a majority in the 100-member chamber. Back in January, I blogged that gaining GOP control was possible but a long shot.
A look back at my assessments then shows that the political terrain has shifted largely, though not uniformly, in the GOP’s favour. In January, I assessed Arkansas, North Dakota, Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania, California and Connecticut as possible GOP pick-ups. To varying degrees, that remains the case.
…So could Republicans win a 51-49 majority? It’s still a tall order but it’s a lot more achievable now than it was at the start of the year. Here’s their path to victory, starting off with the seats that are most likely to fall into the GOP column…
The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s remarks in the Corner.
On a union protester in France claiming that “We want to stop work at 60 because it’s something our parents, our grandparents and even our great-grandparents fought for”:
Is that what the Second World War was about? I thought it was about something else.
…And that I think are the two effects that people living here see abroad. In the end, the social democratic state is unsustainable because the public sector, being parasitic, is too large and the private sector is unable to sustain it. And secondly, it changes the spirit of the people in a way that in the end can be irreversible.
We think that NJ Governor Chris Christie is going to have a field day with the NJ Turnpike Audit. Luke Funk gives us the scoop in Fox New York.
Auditors say the New Jersey Turnpike Authority wasted $43 million on unneeded perks and bonuses. In one case, an employee with a base salary of $73,469 earned $321,985 when all payouts and bonuses were included.
The audit says that toll dollars From the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway were spent on items ranging from an employee bowling league to employee bonuses for working on birthdays and holidays.
…The biggest expense uncovered in the audit was $30 million in unjustified bonuses to employees and management in 2008 and 2009 without consideration of performance.
…The Comptroller’s Office audit released Tuesday says taxpayers also paid $430,000 for free E-ZPass transponders for employees to get to work and nearly $90,000 in scholarships for workers’ kids.
…Comptroller Matt Boxer says tolls are set for another increase in 2012.
“While tolls are going up, the Turnpike Authority is overpaying its employees, overpaying its management, overpaying for its health plan and overpaying for legal services,” Boxer said in a statement.
Public money was also used to cover costs for a toll operators event that none of the authority’s employees actually attended. …