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Mark Steyn rises to the challenge from Abe Greenwald. 

Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine tweets:

“Is there any chance that Mark Steyn won’t use the Italian captain fleeing the sinking ship as the lead metaphor in a column on EU collapse?”

Oh, dear. You’ve got to get up early in the morning to beat me to civilizational-collapse metaphors. ….

… Abe Greenwald isn’t thinking big enough. The Costa Concordia isn’t merely a metaphor for EU collapse but – here it comes down the slipway – the fragility of civilization. Like every ship, the Concordia had its emergency procedures – the lifeboat drills that all crew and passengers are obliged to go through before sailing. As with the security theater at airports, the rituals give the illusion of security – and then, as the ship tips and the lights fail and the icy black water rushes in, we discover we’re on our own: from dancing and dining, showgirls and saunas, to the inky depths in a matter of moments.

Today the wealthiest nations in human history build cruise ships rather than battleships, vast floating palaces dedicated to the good life – to the proposition that, in the plump and complacent West, life itself is a cruise, sailing (as the Concordia’s name suggests) on a placid lake of peace and harmony. Since the economic downturn of 2008, the Titanic metaphor – of a Western world steaming for the iceberg but unable to correct course – has become a little overworked, the easiest cliché for any politician attempting to project urgency. But let’s assume they’re correct, and we’re heading full steam for the big ‘berg. When we hit, what’s the likelihood? That our response will be as ordered and civilized as those on the Titanic? Or that we will descend into the hell of the Concordia?

The contempt for “women and children first” is not a small loss. For soft cultures in good times, dispensing with social norms is easy. In hard times, you may have need of them.

David Warren picks on the design of these ships.

… As we approach the centenary of the Titanic disaster, we might observe that the laws of physics remain in force. I was struck, almost risibly, by a BBC sidebar headline, which asked, “How did this happen to a modern ship?” The answer would be: “Easily.”

The builders of these immense floating pleasure palaces declare they are safe because they are loaded with technical gizmos, helping us forget that their extraordinary size is the weakness. The weight of the thing is sufficient to rip any hull apart, when it hits anything immovable; and the oceans are full of things like that. The bigger the ship, the more delicately she must be handled, thanks to the destructive power of this weight; yet the less manoeuvrable she becomes.

Cruise ships are anyway not built as solidly as, say, the Titanic. When airliners took over the North Atlantic run, the fast tough passenger ships designed for its heavy seas went to the scrapyards, ultimately to be reincarnated as these holiday vessels. Cruise ships are built structurally lighter, for moderate speed and moderate seas; then loaded to ever larger economies of scale. They are resort hotels, posing as ships.

As a correspondent with some knowledge of shipbuilding explains, “They are eggshells without proper keels, and they have lots of little propulsion pods below that would each leave quite a hole if rubbed off.” Luck alone may explain why none has yet gone down, a little farther from shore, with losses on the scale of 9/11. …

Chinese peasant farmers launched a revolution with a secret document that hoped to end constant shortage of food. NPR has the story.

… There was no incentive to work hard — to go out to the fields early, to put in extra effort, Yen Jingchang says.

“Work hard, don’t work hard — everyone gets the same,” he says. “So people don’t want to work.”

In Xiaogang there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate.

So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest.

This is an old idea, of course. But in communist China of 1978, it was so dangerous that the farmers had to gather in secret to discuss it. …

Hungarian entrepreneur blogs on why he will not start a business.

I could hire 12 people with €760 net salary, but I don’t. I’ll tell you why.

You could work for my service provider company in a nice office. It’s not telemarketing, it’s not a scam. You would do serious work that requires high skills, 8 hours a day, weekdays only. I would employ you legally, I would pay your taxes and social security. I could give such a job to a dozen people, but I will not, and here I’ll explain why.

I wouldn’t hire a woman.

The reason is very simple: women give birth to children. I don’t have the right to ask if she wanted to. If I had the right, and she answered, she could deliberately deceive me or she could change her mind.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any problem with women giving birth to children. That’s how I was born and that’s how my child was born. I wouldn’t hire a woman because when she gets pregnant, she goes for 3 years maternity leave, during which I can’t fire her. If she wants two children, the vacation is 6 years long.

Of course, work has to be done, so I would have to hire somebody who works instead of her while she is whiling away her long holiday years. But not only couldn’t I fire her while she’s away, I couldn’t fire her when she comes back either. So I would have to fire the one who’s been working instead of her the whole time. When a woman comes back from maternity leave, I would be legally forced to increase her salary to the present level in her position. Also, I would be required to give out her normal vacation days, that she accumulated during her maternity leave. When she finally comes back to work, she would start with 2-4 months of fully paid vacation.

I wouldn’t hire people over 50 either. …

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Robert Samuelson launches on the Keystone decision.

President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his reelection that, through some sort of political calculus, he believes that placating his environmental supporters will improve his chances.

Aside from the political and public relations victory, environmentalists won’t get much. Stopping the pipeline won’t halt the development of tar sands, to which the Canadian government is committed; therefore, there will be little effect on global-warming emissions. Indeed, Obama’s decision might add to them. If Canada builds a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific for export to Asia, moving all that oil across the ocean by tanker will create extra emissions. There will also be the risk of added spills.

Now consider how Obama’s decision hurts the United States. For starters, it insults and antagonizes a strong ally; getting future Canadian cooperation on other issues will be harder. Next, it threatens a large source of relatively secure oil that, combined with new discoveries in the United States, could reduce (though not eliminate) our dependence on insecure foreign oil.

Finally, Obama’s decision forgoes all the project’s jobs. …

Joel Kotkin explains the decision in terms of the great American divide.

America has two basic economies, and the division increasingly defines its politics. One, concentrated on the coasts and in college towns, focuses on the business of images, digits and transactions. The other, located largely in the southeast, Texas and the Heartland, makes its living in more traditional industries, from agriculture and manufacturing to fossil fuel development.

Traditionally these two economies coexisted without interfering with the progress of the other. Wealthier gentry-dominated regions generally eschewed getting their hands dirty so that they could maintain the amenities that draw the so-called creative class and affluent trustifarians. The more traditionally based regions focused, largely uninhibited, on their core businesses, and often used the income to diversify their economies into higher-value added fields.

The Obama administration has altered this tolerant regime, generating intensifying conflict between the NIMBY America and its more blue-collar counterpart. The administration’s move to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico represents a classic expression of this conflict. To appease largely urban environmentalists, the Obama team has squandered the potential for thousands of blue-collar jobs in the Heartland and the Gulf of Mexico.

In this way, Obama differs from Bill Clinton, who after all recognized the need for basic industries as governor of poor and rural Arkansas. But the academic and urbanista-dominated Obama administration has little appreciation for those who do the nation’s economic dirty work. …

More on the environmental divide from William Tucker in the American Spectator.  

… In 1977, I wrote a cover story for Harper’s called “Environmentalism and the Leisure Class,” my first story for a national magazine. Environmentalism was very young at the time — born supposedly on Earth Day in 1970 — but had already achieved a seat in the upper echelons of the Carter Administration. These freshly appointed bureaucrats began canceling dams, preaching the sins of fossil fuels, and raising obstacles to nuclear power. In its place they promised distant, over-the-horizon technologies of wind and solar energy. I remember one iconic photograph of Andrew Young, Carter’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, holding a pyramid over his head on Earth Day in the fashionable superstition that pyramids had mysterious powers to concentrate the sun’s rays.

My story in Harper’s was built around the devastating 1977 New York City blackout (the subject of the book The Bronx is Burning) and the almost forgotten fact that Con Edison had been trying for 15 years to construct an upstate power plant designed to prevent blackouts. The Storm King Mountain facility was a pumped storage plant 40 miles up the Hudson that stored power overnight by pumping water uphill and then releasing it the next day to generate hydroelectricity. The idea was to avoid building more coal plants in New York City. As an added attraction, the utility never failed to mention, the floodgates could be opened in an instant to provide power in the event of an emergency, while ordinary generators took the better part of an hour to get up to speed.

Pumped storage was considered an engineering marvel of the time and many were built. There are now about 30 around the country. In the Hudson Highlands, however, Con Ed had unwittingly disturbed a nest of New York aristocrats who had escaped from the city in the 19th century. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who now lives in the area) would write 30 years later without a trace of irony:

The committee [the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference] quickly found support among the well-heeled residents of the Hudson Highlands. Many of its founding members were the children and grandchildren of the Osborns, Stillmans, and Harrimans, the robber barons who had laid out great estates amid the Highlands’ spectacular scenery and whose descendants had fought fiercely since the turn of the century to preserve the views for themselves and the public. [John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Riverkeepers,Scribner, 1997.]

Well-connected both in New York society and the editorial pages of the New York Times, Scenic Hudson began an opposition campaign that eventually engulfed the entire city. The battle to “Save Storm King” was the nation’s first great environmental crusade, becoming a legal landmark when the Federal District Court allowed Scenic Hudson to intervene on environmental grounds for the first time in history. The case is still cited. Several Scenic Hudson members went on to found the Natural Resources Defense Council. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on Keystone.

… A number of House and Senate Republicans have released similar statements. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said:. “Keystone was an obvious choice: everybody in Washington says they want more American jobs now. Well, here’s the single largest shovel-ready project in America — ready to go. Some of the news outlets are calling this pipeline controversial — I have absolutely no idea why. The labor unions like it. Democrats want it. It strengthens our national security by decreasing the amount of oil we get from unfriendly countries. And it wouldn’t cost the taxpayers a dime. .?.?. The only thing standing between thousands of American workers, and the good jobs this project will provide is President Obama.”

Indeed, although Obama may feel obligated to his environmental supporters, the move makes no sense from either an economic or a political point of view. Moreover, it reinforces a favorite theme of Republicans; namely, that Obama’s top priority is not job creation but reelection. In sum, this is a political gift to Republicans that is likely to long outlast whatever dim memory exists over the payroll-tax-cut extension.

This episode also emphasizes that Republicans benefit when the topic shifts to Obama’s job record and decision-making. There is no better way to help his reelection prospects than for the GOP to nominate someone who provides a nice, fat target for the Obama campaign. The goal for Republicans must be to keep the focus on what Obama has done (Solyndra, the failed stimulus, the debt accumulation) or not done (lead on entitlement reform). The pipeline decision is just one of many examples Republicans will have at their fingertips.

The Economist tells about cat poop coffee. Pickerhead got some from Indonesia from #2 son. Actually was quite good.

… For the civet cats and their famous brew, the prospects were once more encouraging. In 1857 French colonialists introduced the first coffee trees to Vietnam and 30 years later built the first coffee plantations in the country. Farmers were barred from taking harvested beans, so they scavenged for the civet droppings to make their own secret roasts—a practice that gained popularity as the drink caught on in the mid-20th century.

Today most chon merchants don’t look in the wild for manure, but rent out farms for their cats to roam, chew (often less than a fifth of the ripest beans) and then let nature take its course. After farmers collect and wash the droppings, they dry them in the sun for weeks until the outer skin falls off. Brewers then use one of several methods for roasting the beans. One popular approach involves dashing the beans with sugar, salt and butter, and then giving them a medium or light roast over some coffee-tree wood (a heavy roast would cause the sugary beans to lose their natural taste). …

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Craig Pirrong at Streetwise reacts to the Keystone Pipeline decision. Our country presently has 2,300,000 miles of pipeline carrying natural gas and hazardous liquids. The president doesn’t think we can safely add 1,700 miles. He thinks we’re stupid. 

So Obama has rejected–at least for now, for heaven forfend he make a firm decision–the Keystone XL Pipeline.  He claims that the rejection was not on the merits, but due to the fact that the Republicans had given him too little time–a mere 60 days–to determine whether the pipeline was in the national interest.  This after 3 plus years of the pipeline application began wending its way through the labyrinthine pipeline of the Federal approval process. So it’s not like this just landed on his desk with no prior analysis.  It’s more like: get on with it, Mr. Vote Present.

This from the guy who on every other day berates the same Republicans for foot-dragging obstructionism.  The guy who says he is going to do something every day to create jobs even if Congress doesn’t go along because it is just too slow.

I guess Obama is just President Goldilocks.  This is toooo fast.  This is toooo slow.  But he hasn’t found just right yet.

And the guy who is supposedly sooooo smart that he is bored because his mind is racing ahead of everyone (just ask Valerie Jarrett!) apparently needs a little extra time on this exam.

Please.  This was just another political dodge, wrapped up in a whinging excuse about being hustled along by meanie Republicans. …

More environmentally based economic stupidity is evidenced by a George Will column on the proposed dredging of Charlestown’s harbor to accommodate the large container ships that will soon navigate the widened Panama Canal. So far, our country has been studying the environmental impact of the project for 13 years.

… Newsome says the study for deepening Savannah’s harbor was made in 1999. It is 2012, and studies for the environmental impact statement are not finished. When they are, the project will take five years to construct. “But before that,” he says laconically, “they’re going to be sued by groups concerned about the environmental impact.” A Newsome axiom — that institutions become risk-averse as they get challenged — is increasingly pertinent as America changes from a nation that celebrated getting things done to a nation that celebrates people and groups who prevent things from being done. …

… The huge project of widening the Panama Canal began in 2006; it will be completed in eight years. Newsome, who is unstinting in his praise of the Army Corps, knows it must comply with ever-thickening layers of laws. But even if we stipulate that all these laws are wonderful, we should also stipulate that surely things would move faster if the nation faced an emergency. Such as economic enfeeblement.

The Empire State Building was built in 14 months during the Depression, the Pentagon in 16 in wartime. The aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, which earned 11 battle stars in the Pacific and now is anchored here, was built in less than 17 months, back when America was serious about moving forward. Is it necessary to take eight years — just two years less than it took to build the Panama Canal with yellow fever and without computers — to deepen this harbor five feet?

More from John Steele Gordon.

… Savannah began studying the possibility of dredging in 1999. Today, 13 years later, the study is still not completed. When and if it is, the dredging itself will take five years. So even if dredging started today, Savannah will not be able to take the new Panamax ships until three years after they begin to transit the canal. But dredging won’t start upon completion of the environmental study because various self-appointed guardians of the environment will–as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow–sue, arguing over every comma of the environmental impact statement that will run to thousands of pages. These groups have become past masters at using the legal system to delay–and thus all too often kill–projects they do not approve of, which, it seems, is nearly all of them. …

… The successful completion of the Panama Canal in 1914 was a great psychological moment for the United States, providing powerful evidence that this country could do anything it set its mind to. That attitude built the Hoover Dam, produced the industrial miracle that won World War II?, constructed the Interstate Highway System, and sent men to the moon. Today, it seems, we can’t even dredge a harbor, a technology that goes back centuries.

Steve Hayward proposes a solution to the “Charlestown Harbor” problems.

… Clearly the review process we have now is largely deadweight loss, just as high marginal tax rates discouraged capital formation, investment, and productivity improvements in the high-inflation 1970s.  We can arguably afford the extravagance of regulatory suffocation when the economy is booming at 4 percent growth a year or better (as in the late 1990s) and unemployment is 5 percent. We cannot afford it under the current stagnant circumstances.  A Laffer Curve for regulation will explore just how much economic growth and how many jobs were are sacrificing for this artificial punctiliousness.

What needs to be done?  The regulatory review process ought to have a short deadline.  Agency review should be completed within six or nine months, with a presumption in favor of granting permission unless an agency can delineate a substantively new problem based on precedents from previous similar projects (that is, no speculative objections based on what global warming might do 75 years from now, as actually happened to a proposed project in California a few years back where regulators denied a building permit on the theory that rising sea levels would make the land habitat for an endangered species that would want to move upland).  Standing to sue to block projects should be tightened, and the threshold for hearing such suits made much more restrictive.  And how about requiring that all Environmental Impact Statements be no longer than 200 pages?  I’m sure all the environmental lawyers and consultants who charge by the hour and make a bundle doing these multi-volume EIRs that no one reads will howl, but if the Supreme Court can limit briefs to 50 pages on matters of high constitutional importance, why can’t our regulatory process not emulate a standard of brevity that emphasizes the essential over the frivolous and tedious?

More on NY rent control from Nicole Gelinas.

Does the US Constitution apply on the Upper West Side? The Supreme Court may soon decide.

New York City and state regulate the rents of 982,000 apartments — half the city’s rental homes.

The rules are complicated, but for the most part, apartments are regulated until they’re vacant and lease for more than $2,500 a month. Until then, the government determines annual rent increases. With few exceptions, tenants can renew their leases forever and can hand down their apartments to their kids.

New York controls this “market” because, they say, there’s a housing “emergency.” The emergency is that everyone on the planet wants to live here, and only so many people fit. With a few gaps in time, this “emergency” dates back to just after World War I, when rents soared for returning veterans.  …

Andrew Ferguson profiles Rick Santorum and puts the BS sign on his anti-establishment smoke.

After he almost won the Iowa caucuses earlier this month, Rick Santorum was instantly dubbed a “Washington outsider,” even an “anti-establishment candidate.” It was a convenient tag that made it easier for reporters to keep all these strange Republicans straight: Newt Gingrich, Washington insider; Michele Bachmann, mad housewife; Mitt Romney, establishment prom king; Jon Huntsman, moderate hair guy; Rick Santorum, anti-establishment Washington outsider. Like that.

But Santorum’s titles were rescinded as quickly as they were bestowed, for the press discovered certain details that undercut any claim he might have to be a Washington outsider, such as the fact that he lives in suburban Washington and has for more than 20 years. Rick Santorum has spent his entire career either working in government—his first job out of school was as an assistant to a Pennsylvania state senator—or, when he wasn’t working in government, working to get another job in government, as he is doing now. And when, in 2007, he found himself once again without a government job, having been booted out of the Senate by a large majority of Pennsylvania voters, he took a bunch of government-like jobs right here in his beloved hometown of Washington.

This is where the press smelled an insider.

“After Santorum Left Senate,” headlined the New York Times, “Familiar Hands Reached Out.”

“After Senate,” echoed the Washington Post two days later, “Santorum turns Washington experience into lucrative career as consultant, pundit.” …

Ancient humans used mattresses that chased away insects. Story from the Economist.

SETTING up home in the modern world means acquiring some furniture—particularly a bed. And things were not so different 77,000 years ago, according to the latest research on the behaviour of early man in South Africa. Caves in that country have yielded a lot of discoveries about how Homo sapiens made the transition to modernity. That he liked to sleep on a comfortable mattress is the latest. …

… The most interesting layer is the oldest. It is this stratum that dates from 77,000 years ago. Among the things Dr Wadley’s team found in it were sheets of plant matter several square metres in area, themselves divided into layers. The lower part of these layers, compressed to a thickness of about a centimetre, consists of sedges, rushes and grasses. The upper part, just under a millimetre thick, is made of leaves from Cryptocarya woodii, a tree whose foliage contains chemicals that kill insects.

These insecticidal leaves would have discouraged fleas and other biting arthropods—and possibly mosquitoes, too. Dr Wadley thus thinks that what she has found are mattresses on which the inhabitants of Sibudu slept. They may also have walked and worked on them, in a way similar to the use of tatami in modern Japanese houses.

Andrew Malcolm sweeps up the week’s humor.

Twitter: If Mayans were good at predicting the future, there’d be Mayans. via @jonlovett

Twitter: Newt Gingrich insists that he’ll be in Florida for the primary too. Callista has booked a Caribbean cruise that sails from Miami. @EdCarson1

Fallon: The national debt is now the size of the entire U.S. economy. I don’t want to say Obama is out of ideas, but today he called Tim Tebow.

Conan: During one of the GOP debates, Jon Huntsman spoke Chinese. Not to be outdone, during the same debate Newt Gingrich ate Chinese.

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A remarkable essay has surfaced in NY. Written by a self-employed craftsman and home schooling father, the essay recounts how the green movement has degenerated into groups who fight against advances that can improve the human condition. We get this from the NY Shale Gas Now blog.

Two generations ago the discovery of retrievable gas from the Marcellus Shale would have been greeted with — it’s there, we need it, let’s get it.  Today, after two generations of the environmental movement, the response is — it’s there, you don’t need it, it will hurt the earth.  Other than the agreement “it’s there,” the calculus has turned 180 degrees.??

In the mid-twentieth century the lords of industry reigned as the only team on the playing field.  Today environmentalism has become a full-fledged belief system and has largely won the public relations war.  The environmental movement now plays on the field from a dominant position as the white knights opposed to the now dark lords of industry.  But are the knights really so white and the lords really so dark?  I believe the lords are not so dark and the knights not so white.  However, it is the knights that generally get the free pass, and it is the knights of environmentalism and their seemingly pure quest for the perfect world that I would like to look at.

The current environmental movement fixates on improvements that are immeasurable, intangible and unaffordable.  Where earlier gains in environmental protection tangibly cleaned up dirty rivers, dirty lakes, and dirty air, it now fights against remote possibilities, against threats not actually visible but hiding under every stone and behind every tree in our future landscape.  For these “improvements” it will sacrifice jobs that measurably improve many lives.  It will sacrifice cheap energy that cooks our food, heats our homes, drives us to work and even pumps the water whose purity it holds supreme.  And it will sacrifice public funds on schemes that would never see the light of day if people were asked to invest their own personal resources. …

… The Marcellus Shale and many other resources in this country can be mined responsibly, but none of it can be done completely without risk.  There is neither progress nor freedom without risk.  It is foolhardy to think that a life without risk is even possible.  It is foolish to think that risk always favors the do-nothing position.  The risk of doing nothing is the risk of poverty and stagnation.  I think history will show that to be the greater risk.

The perfect world will be found in neither poverty nor prosperity.  But one is better than the other.  Prosperity will always be messy.  There will always be accidents waiting to happen and unforeseen consequences.  However, history shows — particularly the history of the United States — that more people live better lives when they are willing to take those risks and deal with the consequences as they occur.

It is our prosperity that has allowed us to live in a cleaner and healthier world than our ancestors.  It is our continued prosperity that will allow us to continue doing so.  This prosperity will require an attitude that says, “How can we make this happen?”  It will require an emphatic “YES!” rather than a tired, overused “NO.”

Matthew Continetti profiles Valerie Jarrett – the one we should run against this year.

If for nothing else, Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas will be remembered for an anecdote from 2010. After he spent hours disputing an allegation in the French media that Michelle Obama thought life in the White House was “hell,” press secretary Robert Gibbs encountered senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. She told him the first lady was unhappy with his work. Gibbs exploded in a rage, informing Jarrett that she didn’t “know what the f— you’re talking about” and that if Mrs. Obama was displeased, well, “f— her too.” Subsequent relations between the senior adviser and press secretary were strained. Gibbs told Kantor he stopped taking Jarrett seriously “as an adviser to the president of the United States.”

It’s about time. Many have wondered—and the Washington Post asked last year—“What, exactly, does Valerie Jarrett do?” No one has a clear answer. Whatever she does, the U.S. taxpayer pays her $172,200 a year to do it. A confidante of the Obamas for more than two decades, variously described as the president’s “closest adviser” and a member of the “innermost ring” of influence, Jarrett clearly has the first couple’s ears. She seems to function as a sort of third party to the Obama marriage, guarding the president and his wife from bad news and outside influence while meeting with Lady Gaga. Her lack of any national political experience whatsoever—she had never been to Iowa before Obama competed there three years ago—has not prevented her from shaping the White House’s political strategy and influencing economic and foreign policies. One might liken her to Don Corleone’s consigliere Tom Hagen, bedecked in a designer shawl, except Hagen gave better advice.

What Valerie Jarrett does best is represent the Obama administration in microcosm. She embodies its insularity, its cronyism, its cluelessness. Born in Iran to a prominent African-American family from Chicago, she took degrees at Stanford and Michigan Law. She worked briefly as a corporate lawyer but hated every moment. So she decided to “give back,” which is Chicago code for cashing in. She campaigned for Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, and worked for him in the corporation counsel’s office. Washington died in 1987, but Jarrett remained in government, working for his successor, Mayor Richard M. “Richie” Daley, son of legendary boss Richard J. Daley. It was all upward from there. …

… The House is lost, Obama’s reelection looks dicey, but Jarrett is flying high. In one sense she is the most successful Obama courtier of them all: She has outlasted her rivals. Gibbs is gone. Internal clashes led to Emanuel’s sudden discovery that he had always wanted to be mayor of Chicago. Emanuel’s replacement, fellow Chicagoan Bill Daley (brother of Richie), was muscled out last week; word is he fought with Jarrett too. Her persistence is matched only by her tone-deafness. Wolffe describes the president’s first visit to Chicago after his inauguration. From the window of his helicopter Obama could see that his arrival had caused a major traffic jam. “We shouldn’t have come here in rush hour,” he reflected. This was too much for Jarrett. “You know what, Mr. President?” she said. “You may not be enjoying your new life, but I am.” 

Better enjoy it while it lasts—which won’t be for long if Obama continues to listen to his inept political fixer.

Andrew Sullivan gets the once over from Big Government.

“Why Are Obama’ Critics So Dumb?” That’s the question posed by Andrew Sullivan in the cover story of this week’s Newsweek.

But you’d have to be stupid, fanatical, and dishonest to argue–as Trig Truther Sullivan does–that Barack Obama’s failures are part of an ingenious “long game” that is destined to succeed.

If this is the best Obama’s supporters can do, Obama’s only hope for re-election is the weak Republican field.

Sullivan, who claims to care about national debt, begins by arguing, contrary to reality, that Obama’s massive $787 billion stimulus (actually, $862 billion) turned the economy around. He offers no proof other than the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy familiar from basic economics. Sullivan also ignores the composition of the stimulus, which shoveled cash to cronies and bloated big states with their massive public sector obligations.

In addition, Sullivan claims that Obama’s auto bailout succeeded–when in fact it pushed aside property rights and subsidized failed “green” cars, rather than allowing car makers to rebuild through normal bankruptcy. He also commends Obama for continuing George W. Bush’s bank bailouts–but does not mention the Dodd-Frank financial “reforms” that enshrine “too big to fail,” hurt small businesses and fail to address Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Next, Sullivan tries to defend Obama on taxes, pointing out that the president passed tax cuts as part of the stimulus. He ignores the numerous new taxes and tax increases that Obama signed into law–from higher cigarette taxes to the many ObamaCare taxes–as well as the glaring fact that Obama has been campaigning for the past several years on the promise to raise taxes on the rich, and would have done so if not for Congress.

Additional response to Sullivan from Nile Gardiner.

… As I’ve noted previously, this is probably the nastiest US presidency in decades. There is nothing “dumb” about the administration’s critics questioning attacks on political opponents, which have been a hallmark of this administration. Take Joe Biden’s appalling comparison of the Tea Party to terrorists last August. As I wrote at the time, “there is something deeply sad and disconcerting when the vice president decides to compare opposition legislators in Congress with terrorists simply because he disagrees with their views and principles. This is the kind of ugly, threatening rhetoric that has no place at the heart of the US presidency.”

Obama’s critics have also been smart to criticise the arrogance of an imperial-style presidency with a penchant for acting without Congressional restraint. The president’s hubris, from accepting the Nobel Peace Prize just months after taking office, to declaring himself the fourth best president in US history, knows no bounds, and has been a defining characteristic of a presidency that is out of touch with ordinary Americans.

For all its talk of “smart power”, this is a gaffe-prone presidency that makes mistakes so elementary they are embarrassing. Instead of calling Obama’s critics “dumb”, the president’s supporters should be telling their own Executive Branch friends to smarten up their act and do a bit of homework, especially when it comes their less-than-stellar knowledge of current affairs. From Hillary Clinton’s description of murderous Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad as a “reformer” to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s calling the Muslim Brotherhood “largely secular”, this administration’s foreign policy track record has been a mess. And as for the myth that the current president is smarter than his Yale-educated predecessor, I don’t recall George W Bush ever referring to “the English Embassy”, or incredibly describing France as America’s strongest ally.

Andrew Cline in the Corner with a snarky send-off for Jon Jon.

Jon Huntsman ended his presidential campaign exactly as he began it: as a pompous, sermonizing mannequin.

To say that Huntsman was Mitt Romney without the flair would be unfair — to Mitt Romney. Despite their surface similarities, Romney and Huntsman were enormously different candidates. Huntsman lacked all of Romney’s great strengths — a reason for running, a coherent message for the voters, a plan for winning, and the discipline, organization, and killer instinct necessary to defeat his opponents. Huntsman brought two visible attributes to the table: condescension and the need for adulation.

He tried to mask his disdain for rank-and-file Republican voters by pandering to them relentlessly. He treated them as beings of little intellect who could be manipulated with cartoonish sloganeering. …

A Corner post asks if a second language is a liability.

During his campaign speeches, Jon Huntsman would often say a few sentences in Mandarin Chinese. This display did not go over well with audiences, which led some commentators to suggest that knowledge of a second language is a political liability. This commentary misses a distinction.

It’s good for candidates to know other languages. Because so many issues involve statistics, it’s also good for them to know calculus. But it would be strange if a candidate routinely interrupted speeches to solve differential equations. People would think that the candidate was just showing off.

And that’s why the Mandarin phrases flopped: People saw them as a sign of boastfulness, not expertise.

Newt Gingrich is overlooking this distinction. Though Romney does not drop French into his speeches, Gingrich is running an attack ad with a 9-year-old clip of Romney greeting French volunteers to the Winter Olympics. Not only is the attack ineffective, it also serves as a reminder that Gingrich himself learned French. (His dissertation cites many French-language sources.) It seems that his new campaign slogan is: “I used to know French, but don’t worry: I forgot it!”

Peter Wehner says Newt has a new friend – Michael Moore. 

Here are two sentences that buttress the argument of those of us who said Newt Gingrich was temperamentally unfit to be president by virtue of his chronic indiscipline, erratic style and lack of philosophical grounding. It comes from Michael Moore, perhaps the most visible and harshest American critic of capitalism in the last couple of decades.

In commenting on Newt Gingrich’s assault on Bain Capital specifically and capitalism more broadly, here is what Mr. Moore said: “I wondered who they stole from my crew. It was fun to hear what I have been saying for 20 years, not just by any Republican candidate, but Newt Gingrich.”

Say goodnight, Newt.

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Egypt is in big trouble. We know that because Jimmy Carter is happy with events there. Jonathan Tobin has the story.

If you weren’t already worried about the direction events are heading in in Egypt, here’s one more reason to be worried: Jimmy Carter?’s feeling good about things. Carter, who was in the country monitoring the recent elections, had this to say about the impact of the new Egyptian government on the Middle East peace process:

“This new government will probably be much more concerned about the rights of the Palestinians than have the previous rulers or leaders in Egypt, but in my opinion that will be conducive to a better prospect of peace between Israel and its neighbors.”

But the only real difference between the Mubarak government and his successors is that the latter are good friends with the Hamas terrorists who run Gaza. In Carter’s distorted worldview, support for Palestinian Islamists is synonymous with “Palestinian rights.” That’s bad enough, but to think the opening up of Hamas’s supply lines and its increased influence will actually lead to peace is so contrary to logic and reason the only conclusion one can draw from such a statement is that any development that heightens Israel’s isolation and increases the danger of terrorism is something the 39th president regards with complacence.

Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin write for City Journal on the “New Authoritarians.”

“I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer,” said President Obama this week as he claimed new powers for himself in making recess appointments while Congress wasn’t legally in recess. The chief executive’s power grab in naming appointees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board has been depicted by administration supporters as one forced upon a reluctant Obama by Republican intransigence. But this isn’t the first example of the president’s increasing tendency to govern with executive-branch powers. He has already explained that “where Congress is not willing to act, we’re going to go ahead and do it ourselves.” On a variety of issues, from immigration to the environment to labor law, that’s just what he’s been doing—and he may try it even more boldly should he win reelection. This “go it alone” philosophy reflects an authoritarian trend emerging on the political left since the conservative triumph in the 2010 elections.

The president and his coterie could have responded to the 2010 elections by conceding the widespread public hostility to excessive government spending and regulation. That’s what the more clued-in Clintonites did after their 1994 midterm defeats. But unlike Clinton, who came from the party’s moderate wing and hailed from the rural South, the highly urban progressive rump that is Obama’s true base of support has little appreciation for suburban or rural Democrats. In fact, some liberals even celebrated the 2010 demise of the Blue Dog and Plains States Democrats, concluding that the purged party could embrace a purer version of the liberal agenda. So instead of appealing to the middle, the White House has pressed ahead with Keynesian spending and a progressive regulatory agenda.

Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.

The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. …

A defense of equity capital from Holman Jenkins.

… the best antidote to foolish thinking about job creation is the work of economists Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger. Their painstaking research has revealed a side of America’s dynamism that isn’t always pretty. Between 1977 and 2005, years roughly overlapping Mr. Romney’s business career, some 15% of all jobs were destroyed every year, even as total jobs grew by an average of 2% a year. Job creation and destruction are both relentless, the authors showed in paper after paper. The small difference between the two is what we call prosperity.

But now Republicans are worried. To fault Mr. Romney for being involved with businesses that both grew and shrank, that created jobs and destroyed them, may be to fault him for having eaten from the tree of knowledge in a way that, say, President Obama has not. But how will his story fare in November against Mr. Obama’s simpler story, in which ravenous capitalists destroy jobs and government creates them with things like the Detroit/UAW bailout, solar subsidies and health-care mandates?

Mr. Romney would be a fool to believe a political campaign is the right place to explain the private-equity business. But he has a perfectly defensible story to tell. …

Janet Daley in Telegraph, UK with more on the attacks on Romney.

In the midst of what was shaping up to be a stupefyingly boring US presidential primary last week, an interesting thing happened. This bizarrely unexpected turn of events might have been explained by the desperation of one of the candidates, Newt Gingrich, to make a perceptible dent on the drearily predictable front runner, Mitt Romney, or possibly as an attempt by virtually everybody involved to inject something startling into a monumentally tedious political process. Whatever it was that provoked it, the phenomenon should be of serious interest both in the United States and in Britain, where it has been a feature of our public life for much longer.

What happened was this: a number of Republican candidates who are generally thought to be on the Right of Mr Romney began to attack him from the Left. Homing in on Romney’s career in the venture capital business – a feature of his past which is generally thought to count as an advantage in a contest with the unworldly academic Barack Obama – Gingrich launched into a full-blown assault on the evils of asset-stripping corporate take-over merchants who mercilessly disregard the fate of ordinary workers. Sounding for all the world like a good old-fashioned European socialist (which is to say, like Ed Miliband), he railed against Romney’s former company Bain Capital, which specialised in buy-outs of failing businesses, describing his rival as a “corporate looter”.

The even more desperate (and even more Right-wing) contender, Rick Perry, dragged Wall Street into the mix, and spoke of something called “vulture capitalism” – a rather more lurid image than Mr Miliband’s “predator capitalism”, although it is, in fact, less alarming since vultures only prey on the already dead.

What on earth were they thinking? …

Friday afternoon the White House made a document dump of some Solyndra items. Ed Morrissey was paying attention.

… Let’s straighten out that timeline and connect a couple of dots, shall we?

10/25/2010 — Solyndra CEO writes to the DoE that he will announce worker layoffs on 10/28.

10/27/2010 — In the White House, climate change adviser Zichal sent out an e-mail to Obama adviser Browner and several other officials warning of a layoff announcement in very specific terms — “200 of their 1200 workers” — and added, “No es bueno,” which is Spanish for “not good.”

10/28/2010 — No announcement comes forth from Solyndra on layoffs.

10/30/2010 — Solyndra investor explains that the DoE “push[ed] very hard” for a delay on the announcement until November 3rd, the day after the election, even remarking that the DoE “oddly they didn’t give a reason for that date.”

One does not have to be Sherlock Holmes to see the game afoot in this sequence.  The DoE alerted the White House to the “no es bueno” situation at Solyndra, which would have undermined Democratic arguments that their spending spree in 2009 created real jobs rather than unbearable risk for borrowed taxpayer funds.  After the White House got alerted to the situation, suddenly the Solyndra announcement never takes place, and two days later the primary investor has to explain internally that the DoE pressured them to delay the announcement.

Something smells very badly.  It’s clear that the Obama administration at some level used taxpayer funds as leverage to manipulate a private enterprise for purely electoral benefit to the President, and it seems clear that the direction to do this came from the White House.  I’ll bet we have a few more Friday night document dumps to go in this scandal.

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Blake Hurst, a Missouri farmer, writes about federal regulations. He reacts to the claim by David Brooks, and others, that complaints about the burden of the state is just “right wing nuttery.”

… That’s what I’ll tell one of the suppliers for my farm, who runs a very small fertilizer business. He was recently fined around a third of his yearly profit for failing to correctly complete his “Risk Management Plan.” He had hired a consultant, but his consultant neglected to complete the form in the prescribed manner. Even though the form was incomplete, the information he did file filled a three-ring binder three inches thick. The owner of the business has to re-file the plan online. The instruction form for the filing is 110 pages. Timothy Noah subtitled his article “Republicans surpass their own environmental absurdity.” My friend has been operating his business, without incident, for nearly 40 years. Absurd is no doubt how he would describe the new regulatory regime, if he was asked to do so without resorting to four letter words.

Similarly, the Department of Labor has recently released a proposed rule on child labor. The rule would end the learner exemption that allows farm kids to work with animals or operate machinery during their participation in a 4-H or FFA (formerly known as Future Farmers of America) project. The new rule would also prohibit children from working on their grandfather’s farm, or a family farm organized as a corporation.

Tens of thousands of young people in their first two years of high school, the age range covered by the proposed rule, participate in what are called Supervised Agricultural Experiences as part of vocational training. The new rules would end their ability to work with livestock or operate machinery. My project when I was 14 and 15 years old was a couple of steers and 40 acres of corn. I fed the steers, helped to plant and harvest the corn, and kept a set of books for the whole operation. Only the bookkeeping would be allowed under the new rules.

After four years working as a young teenager, I’d saved enough money to pay for my college education. While corn prices today are at record highs, they have not increased as much as tuition has, so that path to a college education may not be available to my granddaughter.

Either way, the point is not ultimately about money. It’s about what constitutes an education. To those of us in flyover country, “learning how to work” is still a crucial part of growing up.

That faith in the value of work, even for kids under 16, is the sort of thing that causes our betters to lose patience with us. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis has said that she refuses to “stand by while youngsters working on farms are robbed of their childhood.” A recent article in the Kansas Law Journal calling for stricter rules on farm labor attacked our old-fashioned beliefs head on: “Even today, many Americans believe in the value of labor intensive work, and that positive work experience can foster individual development, and a sense of responsibility.” Yes, we still believe those things. Even today. …

Mark Steyn has another example of government run amuck.

One of the most disturbing features of the US justice system is its ever more grotesque loss of proportion, at the federal level and in far too many states and municipalities. On his radio show this week, Derb discusses the case of Meredith Graves, the Tennessee nurse who, upon visiting the 9/11 memorial in New York and seeing the signs forbidding firearms, asked the staff if she could check her pistol (lawful and licensed in her home state). She was handcuffed, arrested, and now faces three and a half years in jail for firearms possession – for the crime of being unaware that the Second Amendment does not apply in New York City.

Asked about the case, New York’s thuggish mayor decided to add insult to injury:

“Let’s assume that she didn’t get arrested for carrying a gun. She probably would have gotten arrested for the cocaine that was in her pocket.”

There was no cocaine. The white stuff in her pocket was analyzed by Bloomberg’s cops and found to be, as the nurse had said it was, aspirin powder. So this loathsome slug of a man has slandered an ordinary American citizen on tape in front of the world. Why? Because he can. …

CBS News finds more Obama “green energy investments” that have gone awry.

… It’s been four months since the FBI raided bankrupt Solyndra. It received a half-billion in tax dollars and became a political lightning rod, with Republicans claiming it was a politically motivated investment.

CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra.

Others are also struggling with potential problems. Nevada Geothermal — a home state project personally endorsed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid –  warns of multiple potential defaults in new SEC filings reviewed by CBS News. It was already having trouble paying the bills when it received $98.5 million in Energy Department loan guarantees.

SunPower landed a deal linked to a $1.2 billion loan guarantee last fall, after a French oil company took it over. On its last financial statement, SunPower owed more than it was worth. …

… Nobody from the Energy Department would agree to an interview. Last November at a hearing on Solyndra, Energy Secretary Steven Chu strongly defended the government’s attempts to bolster America’s clean energy prospects. “In the coming decades, the clean energy sector is expected to grow by hundreds of billions of dollars,” Chu said. “We are in a fierce global race to capture this market.”

Economist Morici says even somebody as smart as Secretary Chu — an award-winning scientist — shouldn’t be playing “venture capitalist” with tax dollars. “Tasking a Nobel Prize mathematician to make investments for the U.S. government is like asking the manager of the New York Yankees to be general in charge of America’s troops in Afghanistan,” Morici said. “It’s that absurd.”

David Harsanyi in Newt’s creative destruction.

Yes, it’s true that unlike some Republicans, Democrats don’t “enjoy firing people.” They enjoy “investing” your money in exploding electric vehicles, bullet trains and other highly unprofitable but morally satisfying economic misadventures. Venture socialism is certainly empathetic.

Venture capitalism, on the other hand, happens to be useful.

And until the presidential aspirations of Newt Gingrich were dashed by this starch-shirted RINO, there existed a target-rich environment for conservatives — namely Mitt Romney’s elastic record on policy. Yet for reasons not well-known, Newt and other Republicans have chosen to make Barack Obama’s populist case by attacking Romney’s record at Bain Capital.

To the un-cynical independent voter, it may sound as if some conservatives are buying the fable of “unfettered capitalism” rather than concentrating on unfettered government. Now, Gingrich points out that criticism of a single institution is not an attack on the entire free market. This is true enough. Yet when Newt claims that Romney has operated in a “flawed system” wherein “a handful of rich people … manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money,” he is only a couple of pup tents removed from a Zuccotti Park mob or an Obama stump speech. …

A new bio of Eric Hoffer is reviewed in the Weekly Standard.

Not long ago Thomas Edsall told readers of the New York Times that the 2012 Obama campaign had essentially given up trying to win the support of white working-class voters. The Democrats, explained Edsall, had become a top-and-bottom coalition of highly educated professionals, many of whom work directly or indirectly for government, at one end, and the low-income recipients of government benefits on the other.

What’s missing from that alignment are the producers, people who make things and those who maintain and repair them. The starkness of the division was anticipated 45 years ago in the writings of the San Francisco dockworker Eric Hoffer (1902-1983).

Hoffer, a major intellectual figure for three decades, became famous with his 1951 essay on communism and fascism, The True Believer, which bypassed Marx and Freud to explain totalitarianism. Tom Shactman has brought this extraordinary, but unfortunately forgotten, figure back into the public eye with this new biography. …

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Craig Pirrong says the proposed reorganization of commerce and trade duties is like rearranging the deck chairs on the “fiscal Titanic.”

Yesterday, Obama formally requested that Congress raise the debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion. This came only days after Federal debt surpassed 100 percent of GDP–and that doesn’t take into account the vast sums in future government spending commitments, on entitlements particularly.  With deficits running about 10 percent of GDP, debt will increase to about 110 percent of GDP in a year, 120 percent of GDP the year after that . . . I’ll leave the rest as an exercise for the class.  In the meantime, growth remains sluggish, thereby making it progressively more difficult to pay for that mounting debt.

Meaning that the country’s fiscal situation is fraught, and only likely to become more so, due primarily to the growth in entitlement spending.

So what is Obama’s response?  Supporting passage of a serious budget?  Advancing a credible and enforceable plan for containing entitlement spending growth?

Surely you jest.  The actual response is to reorganize the deck chairs on this fiscal Titanic: …

… Overlooking Obama’s typical defiance of Constitutional niceties (he said he’d do this with or without Congress), maybe this makes sense, when evaluated on its own merits.  But any efficiency improvements that result are rounding errors on rounding errors. To say this is an irrelevance and a distraction is the understatement of the century. …

Peter Ferrara examines Obama’s economic record.

The record of President Obama’s first three years in office is in, and nothing that happens now can go back and change that.  What that record shows is that President Obama, with his throwback, old-fashioned, 1970s Keynesian economics, has put America through the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression.

The recession started in December, 2007.  Go to the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org) to see the complete history of America’s recessions.  What that history reveals is that before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.

When President Obama entered office in January, 2009, the recession was already in its 13th month.  His responsibility was to manage a timely, robust recovery to get America back on track again.  Based on the historical record, that recovery was imminent, within a couple of months or so.  Despite widespread fear, nothing fundamental had changed to deprive America of the long term, world-leading prosperity it had enjoyed going back 300 years.

Supposedly a forward looking progressive, Obama proved to be America’s first backward looking regressive.  His first act was to increase federal borrowing, the national debt and the deficit by nearly a trillion dollars to finance a supposed “stimulus” package, based on the discredited Keynesian theory left for dead 30 years ago holding that increased government spending, deficits and debt are what promote economic growth and recovery. That theory arose in the 1930s as the answer to the Great Depression, which, of course, never worked. …

… Today, over 4 years since the recession started, there are still almost 25 million Americans unemployed or underemployed.  That includes 5.6 million who are long-term unemployed for 27 weeks, or more than 6 months.  Under President Obama, America has suffered the longest period with so many in such long-term unemployment since the Great Depression.

Notably, blacks have been suffering another depression under Obama, with unemployment today, 49 months after the recession started, still at 15.8%. Black unemployment has been over 15% for 2 ½ years under Obama.  Black teenage unemployment today is over 40%, where it has persisted for over 2 years as well.

Hispanics have also been suffering a depression under Obama, with unemployment today still in double digits at 11%.  Hispanic unemployment has been in double digits for three years under President Obama.  Over one fourth of Hispanic youths remain unemployed today, which also has persisted for years.

The Census Bureau reported in September that more Americans are in poverty today than at any time in the entire history of Census tracking poverty. Americans dependent on food stamps are at an all time high as well. …

Jennifer Rubin writes about the chances of a better economic future.

Mitt Romney’s victory speech in New Hampshire was the most effective of this campaign. Clearly he aimed to defuse critics who are intent on underplaying his remarkable win. Reminding the crowd that no one other than an incumbent president has ever won both the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, he declared: “Tonight we made history!”

It was both a general election speech and a rebuke to his Republican challengers.

He began by making his case against President Obama:

The middle class has been crushed. Nearly 24 million of our fellow Americans are still out of work, struggling to find work, or have just stopped looking. The median income has dropped 10 percent in four years. Soldiers returning from the front lines are waiting in unemployment lines. Our debt is too high and our opportunities too few.  And this President wakes up every morning, looks out across America and is proud to announce, ‘It could be worse.’ It could be worse? Is that what it means to be an American? It could be worse?

Invoking a campaign catch phrase, he told the cheering crowd: “The President has run out of ideas. Now, he’s running out of excuses.” …

Here is Romney’s speech.

“Thank you, New Hampshire! Tonight, we made history!

This state has always been a special place for our family. Ann and I made a home here and we’ve filled it with great memories of our children and grandchildren. And this Granite State moment is one we will always remember.

Tonight, we celebrate. Tomorrow, we go back to work.

We remember when Barack Obama came to New Hampshire four years ago.

He promised to bring people together.

He promised to change the broken system in Washington.

He promised to improve our nation.

Those were the days of lofty promises made by a hopeful candidate. Today, we are faced with the disappointing record of a failed President. The last three years have held a lot of change, but they haven’t offered much hope. …

Andrew Malcolm notes Romney’s rise in the polls.

Mitt Romney appears to be gaining steam in a new national poll, especially among conservatives.

Former Governor Romney now leads former Representative Newt Gingrich, 34-18, according to a CNN/ORC International survey completed yesterday of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. 

Last month before Todd Palin’s endorsement of Gingrich the pair were tied at 28%. In November Romney had only 20% support. …

According to Charles Krauthammer, Ron Paul has been a big winner too.

There are two stories coming out of New Hampshire. The big story is Mitt Romney. The bigger one is Ron Paul.

Romney won a major victory with nearly 40 percent of the vote, 16 points ahead of No. 2. The split among his challengers made the outcome even more decisive. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were diminished by distant, ­lower-tier finishes. Rick Perry got less than 1 percent. And Jon Huntsman, who staked everything on New Hampshire, came in a weak third with less than half of Romney’s vote. He practically moved to the state — and then received exactly one-sixth of the vote in a six-man contest. Where does he go from here?

But the bigger winner was Ron Paul. He got 21 percent in Iowa, 23 in New Hampshire, the only candidate other than Romney to do well with two very different electorates, one more evangelical and socially conservative, the other more moderate and fiscally conservative.

Paul commands a strong, energetic, highly committed following. And he is unlike any of the other candidates. They’re out to win. He admits he doesn’t see himself in the Oval Office. They’re one-time self-contained enterprises aiming for the White House. Paul is out there to build a movement that will long outlive this campaign.

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Time to examine the Daley departure. Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor kicks it off.

Bill Daley was demoted back in November, a move that had Valerie Jarrett’s fingerprints all over it.   Now Daley is gone altogether, resigning from the White House to return to Chicago to “spend more time with his family” (cue the Dirge of the Political Dead).

Daley and Jarrett (and Michelle Obama, not to mention the president) are Chicago Democrats, but just as in Russia there are vicious rivalries among clans that are ostensibly part of the same governing elite, there are deep-seated hatreds and rivalries within the one party of the One Party State that is Chicago.  Anyone who lived, as I did, through the Byrne-Daley-Washington election, the subsequent election of Harold Washington, Council Wars, and the open warfare that followed Washington’s death understands that.  The rule of Daley II had some similarities with Putinism, with Richie Daley–Bill Daley’s brother–running a natural (city) state, and dividing the spoils among the factions to maintain a semblance of peace.  But the hostilities never went away, and hands always rest on dagger handles.

Jarrett and Bill Daley belonged to different factions in Chicago.  Moreover, whereas Daley was and is a practitioner of crony capitalism who intermediated between government and heavily regulated businesses, Jarrett is and was more ideological, and her ideology is hard core progressive class warrior.

Bringing both factions so close within the White House was a recipe for conflict, and it is pretty clear that such conflicts indeed continued unabated, with Rahm Emanuel (another Chicagoan) and then Daley arrayed against Jarrett and Michelle Obama.  Obama’s political travails starting in 2009, culminating with the election of Scott Brown in early 2010, led to a fundamental divide over what path to pursue: a more accommodating traditional political course (the Emanuel then Daley position) or a more ideological, progressive one (Jarrett and Michelle Obama).

We now know who prevailed. …

Tom Elia at New Editor sums it up.

Daley will step down at the end of the month and will be replaced by current budget director Jack Lew.

Update: Does anyone else find it as interesting as I do that President Obama’s first two chiefs of staff, both very important Chicago Democrats, chose to resign their positions — one right before a big midterm election, and the other before a big presidential election campaign?

Perhaps it’s best explained by an old Chicago Democratic Party political maxim, first uttered by West Side ward boss Bernie Neistein: “Don’t make no waves, don’t back no losers.”

Charlie Gasparino says the moderates have been shellacked.

… Daley thought he had the president’s blessing to move the Obama economic agenda to the center, but that support quickly evaporated as the ideologues and the spin masters like Valerie Jarrett and David Plouffe assumed bigger roles in the administration’s daily affairs.

As I reported on the Fox Business Network back in September, Daley grew increasingly agitated about his role. He openly complained that he was being isolated by Jarrett, Obama’s friend and personal adviser, who’s been at the forefront of Obama’s most recent leftward tilt, and let it be known that he wanted to do something else — maybe serve as treasury secretary, given his banking background at JP Morgan.

At the time, I received an interesting phone call from Daley himself, grousing about my report without offering any specific complaints. When I asked him if he wanted the treasury, he told me he didn’t “lust” for the job. He issued a similar nondenial when I asked him about his issues with Jarrett.

Those issues were obviously too much for Daley to overcome; he had no choice but to resign and “spend more time with his family.”

One thing is certain: Bill Daley may want to spend more time back in his native Chicago, but the president’s ultraliberal handlers clearly wanted him to spend less time with the man in the White House.

Seth Mandel has more.

The resignation of White House chief of staff Bill Daley must be frustrating to President Obama because it–with some help from the well-timed release of Jodi Kantor’s new book on the Obama White House–reveals the extent to which Obama has succeeded not in creating a no-drama administration (an impossible goal in the Washington of 2012 anyway), but rather in creating the impression of one.

The New York Times? tries admirably to parrot the administration line, calling Daley’s departure a “distracting shake-up in a White House that has prided itself on a lack of internal drama, with a tightly knit circle of loyal senior advisers playing a steadying role.” But the paper is forced to give away the game later on in the story, revealing the Obama White House for what it is: the Hotel California of presidential administrations:

“While the president said he asked Mr. Daley to reconsider his decision, he did not apply the kind of pressure he brought to bear on Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has for several months been eager to return to New York.”

The Times is right; Geithner has been begging to leave. And far from being chock full of “loyal senior advisers,” the White House is made up of people trying desperately to get out before their term is up (Daley, Geithner) and comically disastrous hires to which Obama has shown a generous amount of loyalty (Eric Holder?, former press secretary Bob Gibbs). …

Jennifer Rubin.

… In the wake of the president’s extra-constitutional power grab on recess appointments and his demonization of the Republican Party, it would seem the president’s leftist instincts and advisors are fully in command. There is no pretense of trying to reach deals with the Republicans on entitlement or tax reform. The Defense Department’s budget, if the president has his way, will be cut. The base extols in the showing of no-holds-barred leftism. But now that everything is subsumed to the goal of re-election, how exactly does the undisguised lurch to the left help Obama?

Obama’s blank slate, on which moderate voters projected their aspirations, is now filled in. The resulting portrait is of a president unwilling to talk turkey to his own base, unwilling to address our debt and convinced that vilification and name calling is the key to success. Comity, the constitution or governance? Forget it. In both Obama and Newt Gingrich you now see the crystallization of lowest-common denominator politics. The politics of personal destruction? They are a matched pair, perfect practitioners of that game. Alas, the country is not better off. But boy do they feel good showing who is a force to be reckoned with.

The Hill Blog has a post on the subject.

… Daley was only ineffective because his boss would not let him be effective.

Bill Daley is a political pragmatist. He cuts deals. Like his father and his brother, he is not a left-wing ideologue; nor is he a Republican in Democratic clothing.

He is a pro-business Democrat, an increasingly rare breed these days in Washington.

Obama is not a pro-business Democrat. His wife is not a pro-business Democrat. They don’t like the business community. They don’t trust the free market. They want to spread wealth around (other people’s wealth, I might add).

Jennifer Rubin reports David Brooks went to confession on the Laura Ingraham show.

Politico reports that moderate New York Times columnist David Brooks confessed to radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, regarding President Obama:

‘ I still like him and admire him personally, but he’s certainly more liberal than I thought he was. He’s more liberal than he thinks he is. He thinks he’s just slightly center-left, but when you get down to his instincts, they’re pretty left. And his problem is that he can’t really act on them, because it would be political disaster. And so that means, I think right now he’s doing very little, proposing very little.” ‘

I’ll put aside for now whether he should turn in his pundit badge after misjudging a liberal president so badly, for so long and with so much certitude.

But for now, let’s consider carefully what Brooks is saying. He contends in essence that the entire 2008 campaign was a canard and, worse, that Obama is so politically tone-deaf and insulated that he doesn’t recognize that he is badly out of step with a center-right country. No wonder Obama imagines the Republicans who decry his liberal statism are acting out of malice. If he’s the personification of reasoned centrism, then they must be extreme and irrational. …

Jennifer also looks into the background of the foolish Gingrich attacks on Romney.

The decision by Newt Gingrich to go anti-Bain — and those ostensibly trying to help him — are in some ways inexplicably stupid. Why would Gingrich, who already has a reputation as a thorn in the side of the right and a malicious self-promoter, attack Mitt Romney on free-market capitalism, which is at the center of the modern Republican Party?

Gingrich has never been known as one to distinguish good ideas from bad, but consider the other Republicans who have involved themselves in an endeavor which will likely go down as a text-book example of political stupidity.

There is Barry Bennett, the longtime establishment Republican operative from Ohio, who supposedly paid for the anti-Bain film. Did he think this was smart Republican political strategy? A longtime Ohio Republican activist and national Republican fundraiser who knows Bennett said, “I’m shocked.” He acknowledged, “Barry is a gun for hire,” but said that mainstream Republicans would find the attack piece repulsive. …

The Occupiers in DC are getting some of their natural allies.

The rat population around the two Occupy D.C. camps at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza has “exploded”since protesters began their vigil in October, according to Mohammad N. Akhter, the director of the District’s Department of Health.

Akhter said in an interview Monday that city health inspectors have seen rats running openly through both camps and spotted numerous new burrows and nests underneath hay-stuffed pallets occupiers are using for beds. Both campsites had working kitchens for weeks until last week, but protesters at McPherson Square voluntarily closed down theirs after health inspectors pointed out unsanitary conditions during an informal monitoring visit. …

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It is tiring to forever follow the mess in DC, so today is politics free day! First, our favorite from the NY Times, John Tierney as he tells us how we might manage our new year’s resolutions better.

IT’S still early in 2012, so let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume you have made a New Year’s resolution and have not yet broken it. Based on studies of past resolutions, here are some uplifting predictions:

1) Whatever you hope for this year — to lose weight, to exercise more, to spend less money — you’re much more likely to make improvements than someone who hasn’t made a formal resolution.

2) If you can make it through the rest of January, you have a good chance of lasting a lot longer.

3) With a few relatively painless strategies and new digital tools, you can significantly boost your odds of success.

Now for a not-so-uplifting prediction: Most people are not going to keep their resolutions all year long. They’ll start out with the best of intentions but the worst of strategies, expecting that they’ll somehow find the willpower to resist temptation after temptation. By the end of January, a third will have broken their resolutions, and by July more than half will have lapsed.

They’ll fail because they’ll eventually run out of willpower, which social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control.

The result is “ego depletion,” as this state of mental fatigue was named by Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University (and my co-author of a book on willpower). He and many of his colleagues have concluded that the way to keep a New Year’s resolution is to anticipate the limits of your willpower.

One of their newest studies, published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tracked people’s reactions to temptations throughout the day. The study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago, showed that the people with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can.

These strategies are particularly important if you’re trying to lose weight, which is the most typical New Year’s resolution as well as the most difficult. …

Believe it or not, the iPhone is now five years old. Wired has the story of how it has changed in just that short period of time.

Gadget fans may be focused on the CES trade show this week, but there’s something else notable going on today: It’s the iPhone’s fifth birthday.

Five years ago today, Apple unveiled the original iPhone to the world. It wasn’t a tightly kept secret, shrouded in mystery and speculation like more recent Apple announcements, but it was arguably the world’s most anticipated gadget launch.

Although its form factor — a capacitive touchscreen candy bar — hasn’t dramatically changed over the years, each iteration of the iPhone has yielded important improvements. Let’s take a look back at how the iPhone revolutionized what we thought a phone could be.

The iPhone Is Revealed
“An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator,” Jobs said when preparing to introduce the iPhone in January 2007. “An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator…. These are not three separate devices!” …

Wired also tells us drones now make up one third of our country’s military aircraft.

Remember when the military actually put human beings in the cockpits of its planes? They still do, but in far fewer numbers. According to a new congressional report acquired by Danger Room, drones now account for 31 percent of all military aircraft.

To be fair, lots of those drones are tiny flying spies, like the Army’s Raven, that could never accommodate even the most diminutive pilot. (Specifically, the Army has 5,346 Ravens, making it the most numerous military drone by far.) But in 2005, only five percent of military aircraft were robots, a report by the Congressional Research Service notes. Barely seven years later, the military has 7,494 drones. Total number of old school, manned aircraft: 10,767 planes.

A small sliver of those nearly 7,500 drones gets all of the attention. The military owns 161 Predators — the iconic flying strike drone used over Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere — and Reapers, the Predator’s bigger, better-armed brother.

But even as the military’s bought a ton of drones in the past few years, the Pentagon spends much, much more money on planes with people in them. Manned aircraft still get 92 percent of the Pentagon’s aircraft procurement money. Still, since 2001, the military has spent $26 billion on drones, the report — our Document of the Day — finds.

The drones are also getting safer. …

Dilbert’s Scott Adams just got addicted to golf. He tries to understand why.

I have a hypothesis that the things we do for recreation are usually metaphors that allow us to express our caveman instincts in socially appropriate ways. The nearer an activity is to our basic hunting and gathering nature, the more we like it.

Consider golf. Until recently, I had never golfed, and was baffled by its appeal. On the surface, the game is nothing but random rules about the proper way to put a round object in a hole in the ground. I have a good imagination, but prior to taking up golf, I couldn’t imagine enjoying the so-called sport. That said, as part of my “Year of Trying New Things” (more on that another day), I leapt into golf with both feet. Result: Instant addiction.

What the hell??? How could such a bizarre activity be so appealing? I needed to understand this thing. I started by mapping the components of golf to their caveman origins:

          Using clubs (Okay, that one is obvious. Humans are tool users.)

          Problem solving (Every hole is different.)

          Hunting (Locate your ball)

         Killing (Whack the ball when you find it.) …

Popular Science tells how 100 year old Scotch was created from Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic stash.

In 1907, Ernest Shackleton and crew set out on the ship Nimrod to visit Antarctica and, they hoped, the South Pole. The good news was, the entire party survived the trip, thanks in part to the Rare Old Highland Whisky they brought to the frozen continent. But the expedition was forced to evacuate in 1909, some 100 miles short of the Pole they sought. And, as winter ice encroached and the men hurried home, they left behind three cases of the choice whisky.

In 2007, just about a century later, the whisky was found, intact, at the expedition’s hut at Cape Royds in Antarctica.

The stuff was made by Mackinlay & Co at the Glen Mhor distillery in 1896 or thereabouts. Mackinlay hasn’t been an active brand for a while now, but the current owner of the Mackinlay name, Whyte and Mackay, obtained a few of the precious bottles and set out to do what any right-thinking Scot would do: first, taste the whisky; and second, attempt to analyze and re-create it. The result, a product called Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky, is, as of this writing, buyable in stores.

How was the re-creation carried out? Dr. James Pryde, chief chemist at Whyte and Mackay, subjected the samples to a comprehensive chemical analysis, in conjunction with a rigorous sensory analysis (that is, sniffing and tasting). Firstly, it was established that the alcoholic strength of the whisky was high enough that it very likely never froze over the years it spent interred in Antarctica. In winter, the hut reached a minimum temperature of -32.5°C, but, at 47 percent alcohol, the whisky remained liquid down to a couple of degrees cooler than that extreme. This eliminated what had been a significant source of concern about the quality of the sample, that decades of freezing and thawing had altered or ruined it. Carbon dating verified that the whisky did indeed date from the Shackleton era. …

We learn from Entertainment Weekly Lily on ‘Modern Family’ will drop the F-bomb in next week’s episode.

On next week’s Modern Family, toddler Lily is going to use one of the worst of George Carlin’s famous Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.

The adopted two-and-a-half year-old character somehow picks up the profanity “f–k.” This naturally horrifies her parents, Cam and Mitchell, who in particular fear she’ll blurt it at an upcoming wedding. Lily is shown saying the word, but it’s not audible to the viewer. The episode’s title: “Little Bo Bleep.”

It might be the first time in a scripted family broadcast TV series where a child has said the f-word. …

That was fun! Tomorrow we’ll get back to finding ways to save our country by ridding ourselves of Valerie Jarrett’s Washington stooge.

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Debra Saunders says the president doesn’t work well with others.

President Obama is running for re-election with an unusual pitch: He can’t work with others.

He only gets along with yes-men. “I refuse to take no for an answer,” Obama said Wednesday of his decision to make a “recess” appointment that placed Richard Cordray as head of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Constitution, of course, gives the president the power to make appointments during Senate recesses. Technically, however, the Senate was in session. The imperial president bypassed Senate rules and years of precedent, because he wouldn’t or couldn’t cut a deal.

Later Wednesday, the White House announced three more recess appointments for vacant seats on the National Labor Relations Board. Obama explained: “When Congress refuses to act, and as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.”

Obama, a former constitutional law professor, just kicked the Constitution’s delicate balance of powers by using the executive boot to step on the Senate’s power to advise and consent.

I understand the president’s frustration with the system. In December, 53 senators voted in Cordray’s favor, but under Senate rules, 60 votes are needed to bring his confirmation to an up-or-down floor vote. (Republican senators don’t have a problem with Cordray, per se. They used his nomination in an attempt to roll back some of the regulatory powers and increase congressional oversight of the new consumer bureau, created in the Dodd-Frank law.)

The 60-vote threshold may not seem fair. But in his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote, “To me, the threat to eliminate the filibuster on judicial nominations was just one more example of the Republicans changing the rules in the middle of the game.” He was angry at Republicans for thinking about flouting precedent.

Obama, however, didn’t seem to mind when Democrats changed the rules during George W. Bush’s presidency. On Nov. 16, 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the Senate would hold pro forma sessions – that could involve little more than gavel rattling – during the Thanksgiving holiday “to prevent recess appointments.” …

Interesting historical comparison from John Steele Gordon.

I agree with Pete and Alana–and many others around the blogosphere–that Obama’s mini-Putsch two days ago was both lawless and typical of this administration. Obama only cares about his re-election at this point, and if that requires the Constitution to be trashed in the process, well, so be it.

As Alana pointed out, Charles Krauthammer thinks it might be clever politics, however cynical, because the president is arguing he has to get things done and it’s all the Senate’s fault for being obstructionist. I’m not so sure. The American people take the Constitution seriously and have a limited tolerance for politicians who try to evade it for political purposes. FDR, just off a triumphant re-election (46 of 48 states), tried in 1937 to “pack” the Supreme Court that had been obstructing his programs by adding an extra justice for every justice over 70 years of age. That would have been perfectly constitutional, as Congress has the power to set the number of justices. (There were originally six, and there were 10 after 1863. The number has been fixed at nine since 1869.) But the people would have none of it, and Congress, responding to public opinion, refused to act. It was a devastating political defeat for FDR. …

American.com notes the demise of another anti-fracking study.

Opponents of “fracking,” the use of hydraulic fracturing technology to liberate natural gas from shale formations (among other things) are desperate to tar the new technology before free-energy markets can undermine the green-power revolution with abundant flows of affordable natural gas.

Most recently, some Cornell researchers made the claim that gas produced by fracking would cause more climate change than would the continued use of coal:

Compared to coal, the footprint of shale gas is at least 20% greater and perhaps more than twice as great on the 20-year horizon and is comparable when compared over 100 years.

Apparently, they had to go to some great, and completely unrealistic, lengths to manufacture this conclusion, as a commentary points out in Climatic Change (emphasis mine):

High leakage rates, a short methane GWP [Global Warming Potential], and comparison in terms of heat content are the inappropriate bases upon which Howarth et al. ground their claim that gas could be twice as bad as coal in its greenhouse impact. Using more reasonable leakage rates and bases of comparison, shale gas has a GHG footprint that is half and perhaps a third that of coal.

The anti-frackers will keep trying though—they have little choice. Cheap, abundant natural gas could undercut their ability to drive the energy policy agenda (not to mention transportation policy, housing policy, industrial policy, etc.) by simultaneously pushing coal out of the market, cleaning the air, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And all without a grand government-driven energy policy. Imagine that.

A peek into the coming turmoil in the legal profession can be gleaned from a post from Inside The Law School Scam Blog. This post is a reaction to the head of the ABA expressing little concern over the lack of jobs for recent law grads.

… You really couldn’t ask for a better illustration of how untethered our profession’s powers that be have gotten from basic social and economic reality.  Does Robinson actually think that, under present conditions and into the foreseeable future, an annual tuition of $25,000 would make the average law school a good deal?  Is he aware that this number is 70% higher, in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, than what the average private law school cost 25 years ago?  Does he understand that a $25,000 annual tuition translates into an average of $80,000 of law school debt for students who attend such institutions? Does he have any idea how many current law graduates have career prospects that justify taking on that amount of high-interest non-dischargeable debt?

These are not “complex questions.”  A complex question is whether you’d rather have Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady as your quarterback with the score tied in the fourth quarter, or whether the universe is ultimately a meaningless void, or whether Beggars Banquet is a better album than Abbey Road.  A simple question is whether the current cost of legal education is justified by the likely return on investment it produces.

So here’s to you, Mr. Robinson. You’ve provided a perfect illustration of why Congress needs to take a regulatory flamethrower to your clueless organization, at least to the extent it continues to enable a system of professional accreditation that has degenerated into the smuggest and slackest of cartels — one which benefits law schools, while doing serious damage to lawyers, law students, and, not least, the public at large, which will be picking up the tab for all the selfishness and stupidity that fuels this system.

Slate pays tribute to a new U. S. map.

… American mapmaking’s most prestigious honor is the “Best of Show” award at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. The five most recent winners were all maps designed by large, well-known institutions: National Geographic (three times), the Central Intelligence Agency Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. But earlier this year, the 38th annual Best of Show award went to a map created by Imus Geographics—which is basically one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore.

At first glance, Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America” may look like any other U.S. wall map. It’s about 4 feet by 3 feet. It uses a standard, two-dimensional conic projection. It has place names. Political boundaries. Lakes, rivers, highways.

So what makes this map different from the Rand McNally version you can buy at a bookstore? Or from the dusty National Geographic pull-down mounted in your child’s elementary school classroom? Can one paper wall map really outshine all others—so definitively that it becomes award-worthy?

I’m here to tell you it can. This is a masterful map. And the secret is in its careful attention to design. …