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Rare liberal media kudos for Romney. This from Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal.
Watching Mitt Romney on the campaign trail this weekend after he tapped Paul Ryan as his running mate, it was hard not to be struck by how significantly the candidate’s message and delivery improved. Romney was newly energized, almost sounding like an evangelist preacher as he preached the merits of capitalism and the free market. His rhetoric was sharp and specific as he contrasted his policy vision with that of President Obama’s. With Ryan, he looked confident in his sit-down interview with CBS’ Bob Schieffer. It was as if the ghost of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie entered the cautious, often-awkward pol’s body, to great effect. (Indeed, like Christie, he even challenged a heckler at last night’s event in Waukesha County, Wisconsin.)
This is the type of change that’s very tough to measure in even the best polls and focus groups. Romney overruled his top consultants in picking Ryan; they wanted him to go with a more cautious choice, like Tim Pawlenty. But Romney clearly felt a kinship with the younger Ryan, and the chemistry was undeniable on their first couple of days on the campaign trail. Romney felt unshackled, and felt free to play to his biggest political asset — a fiscal conservatism that’s been the one consistent hallmark of his career, from working at Bain Capital to the Salt Lake City Olympics to his tenure as governor of Massachusetts. …
… Even Christie, known as the blunt political truth-teller to his fans in New Jersey, was a much more cautious pol when he ran against Gov. Jon Corzine in 2009. Indeed, his campaign was rapped for not offering specific plans, resorting to anti-incumbent generalities. It wasn’t until he was elected that he developed his persona as a straight-talking reformer. In a sense, Romney is one-upping Christie, and placing the even riskier bet that calling for major changes is a political winner in the middle of a heated presidential race. High-risk, high-reward, indeed.
Mark Steyn on the money wasted by Barack Obama.
… There are no precedents in history for a great power spending itself to death on the scale America is doing. Obama has added $5 trillion to the national debt, and has nothing to show for it. Do you know how difficult that is to do? Personal debt per citizen is currently about 50 grand, but at least you got a La-Z-Boy recliner and a gas-fired barbecue out of it. Obama has spent America’s future, and left no more trace than if he and his high school “choom gang” had wheeled a barrow of five trillion in large notes behind the gym and used them for rolling paper. Right now, combined total debt in the United States is just shy of $700,000 per family. Add in the so-called “unfunded liabilities” that a normal American business would have to include in its SEC filings but from which U.S. Government accounting conveniently absolves itself, and you’re talking about a debt burden per family of about a million bucks. In other words, look around you: the paved roads, the landscaped shopping mall, the Starbucks and the juice bar and the mountain bike store. … There’s nothing holding the joint up.
Hmm. “There’s nothing holding the joint up. Steyn 2012″: How’s that poll with the focus groups? Not exactly “Morning in America,” is it? But what happens when you blithely ignore debt for a few decades? Here’s a headline from The Wall Street Journal’s “Smart Money” this very week: “More retirees are falling behind on student debt, and Uncle Sam is coming after their benefits.” Maybe that’s the slogan. “It’s twilight in America: More retirees are falling behind on student debt.”
Half the country is entirely unaware of the existential threat Obama-sized government represents, and Mitt seems in no hurry to alert them to what’s at stake, save for occasional warnings that if we’re not careful America will end up like Europe. We should be so lucky. The more-likely scenario is something closer to the more corrupt and decrepit fiefdoms of Latin America. Look at the underlying assumptions of the Mitt-gives-you-cancer ad – that in America a businessman is somehow responsible not only for his employee’s health, but that of the employee’s family members years after said employee has left said employ. No Euro-socialist would even understand the basis of the attack: In its assumptions about the ever-more-tortuous and farther-flung burdens the state can place upon private business, it is quintessentially American.
This election represents the last exit ramp before the death spiral. …Obama has spent the past four years making things worse. More debt, more dependency, more delusion. For Act Two, he’s now touting the auto bailout as a model for … everything! “I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.” In the past three years, he has “created” 2.6 million new jobs – a number that does not even keep up with the number of (legal) immigrants who arrive each month. Obama does not “create” jobs, he creates disabled people: In the same period as 2.6 million Americans signed on with new employers, 3.1 million signed on at the Social Security Disability Office. Obama is the first president in history to create more disabled people than workers. He is the biggest creator of disabled people on the planet. He has disabled more people than the Japanese tsunami. More Americans have been disabled by Obama than have been given cancer by Mitt Romney. …
Andrew Malcolm reports on the president’s call upon the successful Mars landing.
Don’t you hate it when you get word from the White House that the president of the United States is going to call you shortly for a ceremonial conversation? So, you gather your entire science team in a room for the call on a speaker-phone?
And the phone rings? And it’s actually him, the big guy himself calling on his secure presidential phone aboard Air Force One on another campaign trip?
And he doesn’t have a clue who he’s talking with?
D’oh!
Obama’s been getting some deservedly bad press recently about his gutting of the American space program and its pioneering missions. Thousands of skilled space workers laid off in Florida, as in the crucial swing state of Florida. Space shuttle retirements. Nothing to replace them. Astronaut resignations. China’s ambitious space plans. Americans forced to rent seats on Russian rockets.
Last week, NASA and the skilled team at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab scored an amazing success, smoothly landing the largest, most complex robot rover ever on another planet.
Curiosity’s eight-month, 354 million mile journey had nothing to do with Obama. In fact, it’s been under construction for eight years. Which is to say it started under some previous president, who gets all the blame for bad things and none of the credit for successes. And Curiosity’s achievement was no exception. That would have taken grace. …
If you remember, August 2nd Pickings was dedicated to Milton Friedman. James Pethokoukis has a post that illustrates his wisdom. It concerns the failure of Obama’s stimulus package. A failure forseen by Friedman’s 1957 hypothesis that people’s consumption is controlled by their income expectations, not by how money is jiggling around in their pockets.
Embedded in the Obama stimulus plan was this idea: Give people a temporary increase in their income and they will spend that money — at least some of it — boosting the economy. But as many predicted, the temporary tax cuts didn’t provide much bank for the buck.
The reason those results are not surprising — at least to those familiar with the work of Milton Friedman — is that people’s consumption derives from their expectation’s of their permanent income. From the Library of Economics and Liberty:
Keynesian economists once believed that tax cuts boost disposable income and thus cause people to consume more. But according to the permanent income model, temporary tax cuts have much less of an effect on consumption than Keynesians had thought. The reason is that people are basing their consumption decision on their wealth, not their current disposable income. Because temporary tax cuts are bound to be reversed, they have little or no effect on wealth, and therefore have little or no effect on consumption. Thus, the permanent income model had the effect of diminishing the expenditure “multiplier” that economists ascribed to temporary tax cuts.
Or as a new study from the St. Louis Fed puts it, ” … consumption should be weakly related to current income but strongly related to the discounted present value of the income that households expect to earn.” …
John Fund makes some good points about Olympian political correctness.
The London Olympics features 302 events. But this year there clearly is a new category: racial sensitivity. These Olympic Games are rife with examples of people taking offense, and it’s time to discuss some guardrails and guidelines before political correctness takes over completely.
First, some behavior on the part of athletes is clearly out of bounds. After Swiss footballer Michel Morganella’s team lost to South Korea, he said on Twitter that his opponents could “go burn” and were a “bunch of mongoloids.” That’s hardly sporting behavior, and he was sent home for insulting the dignity of the Korean team. Beyond that, it was just offensive speech.
And sometimes it’s the critics who are clearly out of line. NBC was deluged with criticism because it ran an ad that offended fans of gold-medal-winning U.S. gymnast Gabby Douglas, who is black. NBC commentator Bob Costas had just finished a commentary in which he said that “much of America has fallen in love with Gabby Douglas” when a gymnastics-themed commercial appeared promoting NBC’s comedy Animal Practice. It featured a small, grinning monkey doing gymnastic tricks.
Because African Americans have sometimes been compared to simians by people trying to dehumanize them, many viewers complained the ad was racist. NBC responded with an apology and an explanation that the ad was placed in the lineup of commercials long before Douglas won her medal. That should end that story.
Then there are the cases in the middle. …