Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Mark Steyn Corner Post to make you smile.
George Leef over at NRO’s Phi Beta Cons had a teasing link to this exciting news earlier today:
Harvard has appointed Vanidy “Van” Bailey as the College’s first permanent director of bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer student life. Bailey, the assistant director for education at the University of California, San Diego, will assume the new position on July 16.
Alas, this long overdue shattering of the BGLTQ ceiling was marred by the Harvard Crimson’s grossly insensitive coverage:
An earlier version of this article used the pronoun “she” to refer to Vanidy “Van” Bailey, the newly appointed director of bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer student life. In fact, Bailey prefers not to be referred to by any gendered pronoun.
I’ll bet Elizabeth Warren is kicking herself for not thinking of that one.
So America is now the first nation in history in which people take on six figures of debt for the privilege of entrusting their education to persons with no pronouns. That seems likely to work.
Matt Continetti with a new metaphor for the Obama occupation.
Safe to say most Washingtonians had never heard of a “derecho” before June 29, when one of these speedy and destructive windstorms ploughed through the capital, leaving behind dead bodies and battered homes and more than a million households without power. Now the storm is over, and one can expect this obscure meteorological term to pass just as swiftly into everyday speech. Exotic, vaguely menacing, and evoking senseless, abrupt calamity, “derecho” is an especially apt description of America in the age of Obama.
Like the homeowners in Fairfax County, Va., picking up felled tree branches and putting in insurance claims, Americans across the country are still recovering from the Obama derecho that struck the nation from 2009 to 2010. The damage from that whirlwind has been ugly. The cost has been enormous. And another one may form at any moment.
A spectacular confluence of events swept Obama into office. Seven years of war, almost a year of recession, and seven weeks of financial crisis pulled down the incumbent president’s approval rating on Election Day 2008 to an atrocious 25 percent. Obama’s opponent was a war hero and a courageous statesman who nevertheless seemed rather anachronistic, not to mention confused at the bewildering and frightening economic situation.
Obama, on the other hand, had a smooth and graceful and likeable character that appealed to America’s best hopes and dreams of racial and partisan conciliation. His running mate was a dolt, but a familiar one. They promised a new tone in Washington, sound economic management, lower health care premiums, cutting the federal deficit in half, and an end to the war in Iraq. This was the winning ticket, 53 percent to 46 percent.
The economy worsened after Obama’s election. Unemployment spiked. The government took over the financial system, nationalized mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, consumed AIG, drew closer to buying GM and Chrysler, and drastically expanded the monetary base to prevent credit from dissolving further.
The economic and legal and political arrangements that had led to two decades of expansion were being re-written hastily and unthinkingly. A deluge of taxes and spending and regulations was let loose, with the stated aim of transforming the base of a system that had produced the most prosperous civilization in history. It turned out that when Obama spoke of putting America on “a new foundation,” he meant it. …
Toby Harnden covers the jobs report.
… Speaking in Poland, Ohio, Obama took nearly 10 minutes before he turned to addressing jobs and the latest unemployment report.
‘You know, we learned this morning that our businesses created 84,000 new jobs last month, and that overall means that businesses have created 4.4 million jobs over the past 28 months, including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs,’ he said.
‘That’s a step in the right direction.’ Repeating that the report was ‘a step in the right direction’ he added: ‘But we can’t be satisfied, because our goal was never to just keep on working to get back to where we were back in 2007.
‘I want to get back to a time when middle-class families and those working to get into the middle class have some basic security. That’s our goal. So we’ve got to grow the economy even faster.’
Romney ripped into Obama. Speaking in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, where he has been holidaying this week, he described the report as a ‘kick in the gut’ for Americans.
‘American families are struggling. There’s a lot of misery in America today, and these numbers understate what people are feeling and the amount of pain which is occurring in middle class America.’
Hammering his core campaign message, Romney said: ‘It doesn’t have to be this way. The president doesn’t have a plan. …
David Harsanyi says the White House doesn’t want us to “read too much” into the unemployment numbers.
The U.S. economy added a paltry 80,000 jobs in June, which isn’t even enough to keep up with population growth. Economists had expected that 90,000 or more jobs would be added, but private-sector job growth dropped, prolonging a trend that started early this year.
The unemployment rate remained at 8.2 percent. This is the 41st straight month we’ve been at 8 percent or higher. But Alan Krueger, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers said in a statement that, “It is important not to read too much into any one monthly report. There are no quick fixes to the problems we face that were more than a decade in the making.” …
Michael Barone thinks the president’s trip to the “rust belt” the day of the jobs report was a bit of bad timing.
… he seems to have been left with little to say. No wonder he resorted to making jokes about his family and adding, “People’ve been commenting: I need to gain some weight.”
As if to compensate, he ate some grits — a staple once you get an hour of so south of Washington, but not so much up north.
But what else could he talk about? Certainly not the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules shutting down coal-fired electric plants. Nor his decision blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
He could hail the development of fracking in the region’s Marcellus shale natural gas formation in the region, except for the fact that regulators in his administration seem intent on shutting it down.
He could repeat his calls for “investment” in education, but even if you don’t regard that as a political payoff to the teachers unions, the dividends are going to be a long time coming in.
And calls for investment in infrastructure may lead people to recall his chuckling admission that there are no shovel-ready projects, thanks to regulatory and legal roadblocks.
The uncomfortable fact is that Obama doesn’t have a convincing economic story to tell. The recovery summer promised for 2010 and for 2011 and again for 2012 has yet to arrive.
Obama needs majorities in the Rust Belt counties to carry Ohio and Pennsylvania again. But last week’s bus tour shows he’s having difficulty in this historically Democratic territory.
Ed Carson lists 10 ways the lousy jobs report is just the tip of the iceberg.
Nonfarm payrolls rose by just 80,000 in June, slightly worse than expected and the third straight month of sub-100,000 job growth. The jobless rate held at 8.2%. The employment report was disappointing. Here are 10 reasons why the jobs market is even worse than the headline figures.
1. Unemployment has topped 8% for 41 straight months. Last time above 8% – December 1983.
2. The jobless rate actually makes the labor market look better than it actually is. The rate only counts people who want a job but don’t have one. But the labor force participation rate was 63.8% in June, just above near modern-era lows. (It was 66.2% in January 2008 and 67.3% in April 2000). Otherwise, unemployment would be around 11%.
3. The employment-to-population ratio for those aged 25-54 dipped to 75.6% in June, down sharply from 80% in January 2008. Many economists left and right view the core employment ratio as one of the cleanest views of the labor market, because it includes those who have stopped looking for work while excluding the bulge in retirees and young adults in school. …