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Thomas Sowell on Alice in Liberal Land.

“Alice in Wonderland” was written by a professor who also wrote a book on symbolic logic. So it is not surprising that Alice encountered not only strange behavior in Wonderland, but also strange and illogical reasoning — of a sort too often found in the real world, and which a logician would be very much aware of.

If Alice could visit the world of liberal rhetoric and assumptions today, she might find similarly illogical and bizarre thinking. But people suffering in the current economy might not find it nearly as entertaining as “Alice in Wonderland.”

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the world envisioned by today’s liberals is that it is a world where other people just passively accept whatever “change” liberals impose. In the world of Liberal Land, you can just take for granted all the benefits of the existing society, and then simply tack on your new, wonderful ideas that will make things better.

For example, if the economy is going along well and you happen to take a notion that there ought to be more home ownership, especially among the poor and minorities, then you simply have the government decree that lenders have to lend to more low-income people and minorities who want mortgages, ending finicky mortgage standards about down payments, income and credit histories.

That sounds like a fine idea in the world of Liberal Land. Unfortunately, in the ugly world of reality, it turned out to be a financial disaster, from which the economy has still not yet recovered. Nor have the poor and minorities. …

Peter Ferrara says there is no excuse for Obamanomics. 

The history of America’s recessions is provided at the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).  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.  Yet here we are 47 months after the last recession started, and we still have no real recovery.

Instead, unemployment has been stuck at 9% or above for the longest period since the Great Depression.  Unemployment for blacks has remained over 15% for over 2 years, with Hispanic unemployment stuck well into double digits over that time as well.  Teenage unemployment has persisted at nearly 25%, with black teenage unemployment still nearly 40%.

The U6 unemployment rate, reflecting all of the unemployed still wanting work and the underemployed who can’t get full time work, is still 16.2%.  That includes an army of the unemployed or underemployed of over 26 million Americans.  And that still doesn’t fully count the millions of Americans who have given up and dropped out of the work force altogether.

On September 13 came the Census Bureau report fleshing out the full meaning of no economic recovery under Obama.  Median family income has fallen all the way back to 1996 levels.  The Wall Street Journal further reported on September 14, “Earnings of the typical man who works full time year round fell, and are lower—adjusted for inflation—than in 1978.”

The poverty rate climbed to 15.1%, higher than in the late 1960s when the War on Poverty was getting underway, $16 trillion ago.  The child poverty rate climbed to 22%, nearly a quarter of all American children.  The total number of Americans in poverty is higher than at any time in the over 50 years that the Census Bureau has been tallying it.  Moreover, the number of Americans ages 25-34 living with their parents has soared by 25%.

Yes, I know NBER declared the recession technically over in June, 2009, still the longest recession on record since the Depression.  But the point is next month will be 4 years since the recession started, and there is still no sustained real recovery.  Or as economist John Lott has emphasized, Obamanomics has produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression. …

Victor Davis Hanson calls it economic quackery.

Sometimes the wrong medicine can make a struggling patient far sicker than he would have been had he been allowed to recover naturally. Western medicine began with the premise that the physician either must know how to cure the patient or simply leave him alone — but above all not make him worse through harmful treatment.

As 2011 ends, we have discovered how to turn a natural recovery from a near-record recession into a serial slowdown. Almost every haphazard, ad hoc attempt by Barack Obama to jumpstart the economy has only further stalled it. The president has never articulated a diagnosis of why the economy was stalled, never outlined a coherent treatment plan, and so cannot offer a prognosis. If we have a sick budget, a Byzantine tax code, bankrupting entitlements and long-term debt burden, and a costly imported-oil bill, one would never know all that from the president, who has never offered any sort of plan for addressing these crises.

Borrowing over $4 trillion terrified investors and business owners — especially given campaign promises that Obama would not be so “unpatriotic” as to match in three years the debt that Bush had piled up in eight. After all, no one could accuse the Bush administration of having left the economy moribund by slashing government, running balanced or surplus budgets, reducing the national debt, and in tight-fisted fashion denying federal bailouts to reckless banks and Wall Street firms. Apparently, Barack Obama saw the Bush administration’s economic transgressions not as warnings, but as a green light to borrow and spend even more on a predetermined redistributive agenda (“Never let a crisis go to waste”) — as if once a Republican administration had trespassed, conservatives could hardly throw stones at even greater sinners. …

It’s not just the GOP that see he’s a loser, two Dem pollsters say it is time for Hillary.

When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality—and he must reach the same conclusion.

He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president’s accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor—one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president’s administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy.

Certainly, Mr. Obama could still win re-election in 2012. Even with his all-time low job approval ratings (and even worse ratings on handling the economy) the president could eke out a victory in November. But the kind of campaign required for the president’s political survival would make it almost impossible for him to govern—not only during the campaign, but throughout a second term. …

Since he feels free to weigh in on just about any topic, Peter Wehner wonders why Obama has nothing to say about Occupy violence.

I’m puzzled.

Given all of the violence, the lawlessness, the bigotry and the ugliness the Occupy Wall Street movement (and its off-spring) represent, why hasn’t the president spoken out –in a clear, forceful voice – against it?

It can’t be because he thinks it’s none of his business. This is a man, after all, who injected his thoughts on the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates and in the process accused the Cambridge police of acting “stupidly.” Obama has spoken out about the location of the Ground Zero mosque and the 2016 Olympic Games; the reaction of Republican audiences at GOP debates; and the Penn State child rape scandal. He’s suggested that racism is a driving force in the Tea Party movement. He gives sermons on civility in public discourse. And he’s made his picks for the NCAA Final Four on ESPN. Obama talks all the time, on llmost every issue under the sun. And yet when it comes to the actions of protesters at the various Occupy movements around America, he suddenly goes practically mute. …

Occupy returns the favor with a member asking for a moment of silence for the White House shooter. Wehner with the story.

Here is a clip, courtesy of The Daily Caller, in which  a protester from Occupy San Diego told his fellow protesters, “I think we should have a moment of silence in solidarity for the person they said was from the Washington, D.C. Occupy. Maybe, why did he feel the need to shoot the White House window today? So I think we should have a moment in solidarity for the White House, and for the guy that shot at the White House today. I don’t know if you heard, but someone shot at the White House window today.”

Can you imagine the round-the-clock (negative) media coverage if (a) a person from a Tea Party rally was arrested for shooting at the White House and (b) if a Tea Party member from another city had asked for a “moment of silence in solidarity” with the alleged shooter? It would produce days of front page, above-the-fold coverage in the New York Times? and spawn a thousand editorial and columns from liberals, to say nothing of providing MSNBC and CNN with several months worth of programming, hand-wringing, and sermonizing.

I persist in my belief that the media double standard as it relates to coverage of the Tea Party v. Occupy Wall Street (and its progeny) illustrates, in ways few other recent stories have, the widespread bias that exists in large sectors of the media. As I’ve argued before, many reporters and anchors undoubtedly believe they’re objective, detached, and applying a single standard to both movements, which in some respects makes the problem worse. The layers of delusion and self-delusion are astonishing.

Peter Wehner also laid out the unwatchable Mika Brzezinski in a Contentions post he later apologized for. But, it’s still fun.

If you want to see a revealing look at the emotional, and not simply political, investment liberals have in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, watch Mika Brzezinski and Jeffrey Sachs respond to Newt Gingrich’s comments over the weekend that the protesters should get a job and take a bath. Their rage is uncontained, almost tear-inducing, and comical. The whole crew and conversation, with one liberal egging on the other, is a fantastic window into the dominant mindset of modern-day liberal journalists.

One can see that without Joe Scarborough’s presence, the show is essentially the morning version of the shows hosted by Ed Schultz? and Rachel Maddow (though Maddow is a good deal more intelligent and informed than Brzezinski). Speaking of which: One of her colleagues would do Brzezinski a huge favor if they pulled her aside and explained to her the difference between “literal” and “figurative.” During this short segment Brzezinski claims Gingrich was “literally” standing on his “high horse” and his words “literally made my skin crawl.”

Actually, neither was “literally” true. There was no horse on the stage where Gingrich appeared, and Mika’s skin wasn’t crawling, at least from what we can tell. Then again, what would you expect from a woman who, in mocking Sarah Palin, named Abraham Lincoln as one of her favorite founders?

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Jennifer Rubin posts on the Energy Secretary’s defense of Solyndra loans.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s testimony yesterday wasn’t just bad news for him and the Obama administration. It is also an inconvenient reminder for Republican voters that some of the Tea Party-friendly candidates have rotten records when it comes to crony capitalism.

True, Chu’s testimony is most problematic for him and the president. He insisted the Solyndra endeavor was fully scrutinized. He had no idea others were playing politics. This exchange neatly summed up Chu’s cluelessness:

“I don’t see any chain of emails looking out for the taxpayer money,” Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., said in a tense exchange with Chu. “I see a whole lot of emails in the administration that are concerned about the politics. That’s what stinks the most about this.”

Chu denied that he asked Solyndra to delay the layoff announcement, prompting committee Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., to ask if Chu plans to look into who sent the email.

“You don’t know who in your department was involved with this and you have no idea in finding out?” Stearns asked.

Chu said the Energy Department’s general counsel “will look into who is doing these things.”

Chu is a walking advertisement for the perils of giving government bureaucrats duties for which they are not remotely competent to perform. When he says he acted with the taxpayers’ interests in mind, you get the idea that he might be serious. Apparently this crew thinks that the way to compete globally is to mimic failed command-and-control economies. …

Jennifer also says the Occupy group is getting inconvenient for the Dems.

The Occupy movement has officially become a liability for the Democrats. The New York Post reported: “Thousands of anti-Wall Street protesters clashed with cops [Thursday] across lower Manhattan, starting with a march on the New York Stock Exchange [in the] morning and ending with a crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge that snarled traffic.Cops responded in force, at one point [in the] afternoon sweeping into Zuccotti Park and arresting anyone inside. In total, at least 275 people were busted by cops; five of whom were charged with assault.”

And the New York Times opinion section is .?.?. well .?.?. entirely silent on the subject. Need we know any more about how the Occupy “movement” has become an unwanted bedfellow for the Democrats? …

And Jennifer posts on the $15 Trillion national debt.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is out with a new video explaining the implications of the $15 trillion debt we have now racked up:

Not surprisingly, the Republicans are having a field day with facts and figures to highlight their argument that President Obama has presided over a fiscal train wreck. Don Stewart, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s communications director, sent out a handy guide to the debt history:

$8.67 trillion: Democrats take control of Congress, January 2007

$10.62 trillion: President Obama’s Inaugural, January 20, 2009

$10.789 trillion: Stimulus bill signed into law, February 17, 2009

$12.351 trillion: President’s weekly address on the merits of “pay as you go,” February 13, 2010

$14.305 trillion: President’s weekly address where he said “I believe we can live within our means,” April 16, 2011 …

One more from Ms. Rubin as she introduces the subject for the balance of Pickings today – Newt Gingrich. She says he has a lot to do to rehabilitate himself.

Newt Gingrich is experiencing his first real scrutiny of the 2012 presidential primary. Jonathan Martin and John Harris observe, “Even allies say there is simply no way Gingrich can defend all the controversies of his past — there are simply too many of them. His task is to transcend them by seeking to set his past against a context of personal growth.”

That would work better, or course, if in his years after his speakership he hadn’t gorged at the trough of special-interest groups. That is why the Freddie Mac controversy is so difficult for him. As the Politico duo note: “Faced with more Freddie Mac questions on a campaign trip to Iowa Wednesday, Gingrich wouldn’t say whether the report was accurate that he got paid at least $1.6 million and, despite his previous claims, did not warn the organization about the looming housing bubble.” If he doesn’t have his story down yet on the first issue to confront him, it’ll be tough sledding.

And we’ve only begun to see the extent of Gingrich’s self-enrichment. …

In regards to Newt Gingrich, Toby Harnden asks if Americans want another know-it-all president.

… The New York Times has reported that Obama baulked when Tim Geithner, his Treasury Secretary, told him: “Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression.” Far from being overawed by the momentousness of his task, the new president shot back : “That’s not enough for me.”

In his book Confidence Men, Ron Suskind recounts that Mr Obama was frustrated by the mundanity of discussion about a trillion dollar economic stimulus. “There needs to be more inspiration here!” he said in one meeting. Later on, he raised the issue of smart grids. When he was told these were unfeasible as part of the stimulus, he responded: ‘We need more moon shot.”

Having remarked loftily during the campaign that Reagan had been a transformative president in a way that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton had not, Obama came into office making clear his desire to be a Reagan of the Left – as well as a reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt with perhaps a dash of John F. Kennedy thrown in.

When he had hired his campaign political director Patrick Gaspard in 2007, he had told him: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

A similar self-regard was on display from Gingrich (who, like Obama in 2008, has no executive experience) last week when he was asked why his campaign had struggled to gain traction in its early days. “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate and what I’m trying to do,” he replied. …

Andrew Ferguson took one for the team. He read all of Newt Gingrich’s books. He reports to us from the NY Times Magazine.

Let’s consult the literature — all 21 books by the self-proclaimed ideas man of politics. (Gingrich cites 23 books on his Web site. We are not counting the Contract With America or the coffee-table book “Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny.”)

When his top campaign staff abandoned him not long ago, Newt Gingrich didn’t seem terribly surprised. “Philosophically, I am very different from normal politicians,” he said. “We have big ideas.”

The “we,” as Gingrich uses it here, is akin to the royal we — it’s what might be called the professorial we, employed when the intellectual and the ideas he generates merge to create an entity too large for a singular personal pronoun. “Over my years in public life,” he writes in his latest book about how to save America, “I have become known as an ‘ideas man.’ ” And we shouldn’t doubt it. As I write, a stack of books tilts Pisa-like on my desk, each volume written by Gingrich and various co-authors. I got out my tape measure the other day and discovered that the stack is precisely 15¼ inches high — a figure that does not include the various revised and expanded editions that I have had Whispernetted into my Kindle, along with the historical novels that Gingrich has published with a co-writer named William R. Forstchen: three fat books on the Civil War, three on World War II and a pair on the Revolutionary War. If I added these to my stack, it would be taller than the mayor of Munchkinland and much heavier.

The books taken together are evidence of mental exertions unimaginable in any other contemporary politician. Professorial affectations are not high on the list of tactics candidates like to use in this age of galloping populism. Within the politico-journalistic combine, Gingrich’s status as an intellectual is accepted as an article of faith — something that everybody just assumes to be true, like man-made climate change or Barack Obama’s stratospheric I.Q. Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican, says Gingrich is “undoubtedly the smartest man I’ve ever met.” Cokie Roberts calls him “a big thinker.” Without irony the Democratic consultant Paul Begala praises his “intellectual heft” and Howard Dean his “intellectual leadership.” Ted Nugent says Gingrich is probably the “smartest guy out there.” So that settles that.

Or does it? I built my stack of Gingrich books because I intended to read every one of them, in chronological order, and I did read them, though my chronological scheme broke down eventually. Aside from the sheer number of words, what is most impressive about the Gingrich corpus is its range of literary form, from confessional to guidebook.

Gingrich’s first book, “Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the Future,” came out in 1984 and contained the seeds of much of what was to follow. Beneath its cover image — a flag-draped eagle inexplicably threatening the space shuttle — the backbencher Gingrich was identified as chairman of the Congressional Space Caucus, a position that inspired a series of “space cadet” jokes that took years to die. “Window of Opportunity” was co-written by Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, and a science-fiction writer called David Drake. Anyone who takes seriously the books that politicians claim to write must sooner or later confront the delicate matter of co-authors and ghostwriters, especially when the books serve, as in Gingrich’s case, as intellectual bona fides.

I have no inside knowledge of Gingrich’s work habits as a writer, or co-writer. In 1994, I was asked to help write one of his books, but the offer never went far enough to allow for close observation. There’s no reason to be prissy or censorious on the subject of politicians and their ghostwriters. George Washington had ghostwriters (pretty good ones, too: Hamilton and Madison). Lincoln had his secretaries write some letters for him, including, some historians say, the most famous Lincoln letter of them all, to the bereaved Mrs. Bixby. And despite a long parade of co-authors — historians, novelists, policy experts, journalists, even family members — Gingrich’s books show a remarkable consistency from one to the next. His contribution to the books that bear his name must be substantial — certainly greater than that of Charles Barkley, who once admitted he hadn’t read his autobiography. (No one else did, either.) Gingrich’s books are Gingrich’s books.

The ghosts for that first book served him unevenly. They got him in metaphor trouble from the first sentence. “We stand at a crossroads between two diverse futures,” he wrote. This crossroads, it transpired, faced an open window. That would be the window of vulnerability, which is widening. Three paragraphs later, the crossroads, perhaps swiveling on a Lazy Susan, is suddenly facing another window, also open. The important point, Gingrich writes, is that this window of opportunity is about to slam shut. And if it does? “We stand on the brink of a world of violence almost beyond our imagination.”

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Craig Pirrong juxtaposes Solyndra and Keystone.

… On the one hand: An unshakable commitment to throw vast sums of money extracted by coercion from American citizens at delusional, patently uneconomic projects that will produce little energy, and which just oh-so-coincidentally (It is a coincidence!  Really! Chu says so!) happen to be owned by Obama donors.

On the other hand: Using every regulatory power available to stymie the investment of private capital freely provided in economically viable projects that will produce large amounts of energy now and into the future, pursuant to highly speculative–and dubious–theories about the environmental impact of these projects.

The mental vacuum in which these environmental impacts are conceived is beyond belief. …

…In Federalist #70, Alexander Hamilton extolled “energy in the executive.”  In the past days we have seen an executive devoting all its energies, positive and negative, to pushing some projects that will produce no energy, and to thwarting others that will.   An energetic twofer: they will make us poorer, by making energy more expensive, and they will not help the environment–and will quite plausibly make the environment worse. …

Charles Krauthammer writes on pipeline politics.

… Obama’s decision was meant to appease his environmentalists. It’s already working. The president of the National Wildlife Federation told The Post (online edition, Nov. 10) that thousands of environmentalists who were galvanized to protest the pipeline would now support Obama in 2012. Moreover, a source told The Post, Obama campaign officials had concluded that “they do not pick up one vote from approving this project.”

Sure, the pipeline would have produced thousands of truly shovel-ready jobs. Sure, delay could forfeit to China a supremely important strategic asset — a nearby, highly reliable source of energy. But approval was calculated to be a political loss for the president. Easy choice.

It’s hard to think of a more clear-cut case of putting politics over nation. This from a president whose central campaign theme is that Republicans put party over nation, sacrificing country to crass political ends.

Nor is this the first time Obama’s election calendar trumped the national interest:

? Obama’s decision to wind down the Afghan surge in September 2012 is militarily inexplicable. It comes during the fighting season. It was recommended by none of his military commanders. It is explicable only as a talking point for the final days of his reelection campaign.

? At the height of the debt-ceiling debate last July, Obama pledged to veto any agreement that was not long-term. Definition of long term? By another amazing coincidence, any deal large enough to get him past Election Day (and thus avoid another such crisis next year). …

More on the misplaced pipeline priorities of this president from Daniel Henninger. 

The decision by the Obama administration to “delay” building the Keystone XL pipeline is a watershed moment in American politics. The implication of a policy choice rarely gets more stark than this. Put simply: Why should any blue-collar worker who isn’t hooked for life to a public budget vote for Barack Obama next year?

The Keystone XL pipeline would have created at least 20,000 direct and indirect jobs. Much of this would have been well-paid work for craftsmen, not jobs as hod carriers to repave the Interstate.

On a recent trip to Omaha, Neb., Mr. Obama signaled where his head was on the pipeline during a TV interview: “Folks in Nebraska, like folks all across the country, aren’t going to say to themselves, ‘We’re going to take a few thousand jobs if it means our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health.” Imagine if he’d been leading a wagon train of workers and farmers across the Western frontier in 1850.

Within days of the Keystone decision, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, said his country would divert sales of the Keystone-intended oil to Asia. Translation: Those lost American blue-collar pipeline jobs are disappearing into the Asian sun. Incidentally, Mr. Harper has said he wants to turn Canada into an energy “superpower,” exploiting its oil, gas and hydroelectric resources. Meanwhile, the American president shores up his environmental base in Hollywood and on campus. Perhaps our blue-collar work force should consider emigrating to Canada.

Recall as well the president’s gut reaction in 2010 to the BP Gulf oil spill: an order shutting down deep-water drilling in U.S. waters. The effect on blue-collar workers in that industry was devastating. …

Neal Boortz weighs in too.

Barack Obama has taken to micro-managing our economy by picking the winners and losers.  Not only has he chosen “green energy” but he has selected which companies within the industry will benefit from Obama’s piggy bank.  And it turns out that if you wanted a piece of the government’s green energy piggy bank, you would have better luck if you had … donated to Barack Obama’s campaign! 

A new list of green energy loans doled out by the Obama administration reveals that 80% of the $20.5 billion in energy department loans went to Obama’s top donors.  Don’t you think that this is just a bit strange?  This, my friends, is what you would call crony capitalism – using someone else’s money (the tax payers) to reward personal relationships (in this case, for political gain). …

It was two weeks ago when we ran a piece on LSU football. WSJ has another. This time on Brad Wing the improbable freshman punter from Australia who is on his way to becoming a college football legend.

Brad Wing is king of the campus at LSU.

Classmates wear T-shirts that allude to his “swag.” Posters of his infamous 44-yard run against Florida, during which he drew a penalty flag for spreading his arms like an airplane, adorn storefront windows. Just this week, he hit Facebook’s 5,000-friend limit and had no choice but to start his own “fan” page.

None of this should be terribly surprising. Wing, after all, plays football for the No. 1-ranked Tigers. But here’s the weird part: He’s the punter.

While LSU has emerged as the national-title favorite because of its merciless defense, Wing—a 20-year-old from Australia with an unorthodox style—has played an enormous role. He’s helped produce arguably the most staggering statistic in college football this season: LSU’s opponents have totaled a mere seven return yards on his 39 punts. In other words, against LSU, teams can expect to gain about six inches each time Wing boots a punt.

It isn’t sexy, but this is the sort of edge that can separate a national-title contender from an also-ran, particularly in the brutally tough Southeastern Conference, whose teams have won the last five national championships. Every elite SEC team recruits powerful linemen and athletic running backs and receivers. Punters? Not such a priority.

But when it comes to field position, no player has a greater impact—and more coaches appear to be coming to that realization. Wing is Exhibit A. …

Here’s more on Brad Wing from Sports Illustrated. “After all the buildup, Game of Century decided by … kickers.”

… After all that buildup and all that pounding, the two best defenses in the country nullified two decent offenses. In the end, a 5-foot-11, 183-pound walk-on kicker and an Australian punter decided a game contested — for the most part — by 300-pound men beating the stuffing out of one another. Alleman made three short kicks (19, 30 and 25 yards), while his Alabama counterparts, Cade Foster and Jeremy Shelley, failed to score on four of six kicks. One was blocked, and the average distance of the three misses was 48.7 yards. Meanwhile, Wing, the former Australian rules football player best known prior to Saturday for having a trick-play touchdown against Florida called back for taunting, was LSU’s most valuable player. He pinned Alabama inside its own five-yard line twice, and he crushed a 73-yarder that flipped the field in the fourth quarter at a point when the exhausted Tigers defense probably couldn’t have defended a short field.

Alleman and Wing would like the world to know that they were all for a fake at the end of the first half — which is probably why they kick and don’t coach. Wing said the conversation with Miles was more motivational and less tactical. “If he’d [asked about a fake], we would have said yes,” Wing said. “We would have done something stupid.” Miles, in spite of his reputation for brass calls, chose the sure points. …

… When the teams went to overtime, it seemed pretty clear the end zone was off-limits. Montgomery’s third-down sack of AJ McCarron forced Foster to kick a brutal 52-yarder into the wind. The kick died short of the crossbar. “It just came down to who executed on the chances they had,” Alabama linebacker Courtney Upshaw said. “They did.”

On the Tigers’ possession, LSU’s offense finally moved the ball a little. Michael Ford took the Tigers to the seven-yard line on an option pitch. Everything Alleman visualized was about to come true. Miles, Mr. Play-It-Safe, called for the field goal on third down. That way, if the snap went awry, Wing could fall on it and the Tigers could try again.

Just before he called for the snap, Wing looked back at Alleman. “You ready to go?” Wing asked. “You know it,” Alleman answered.

Snap. Hold. Kick. Celebration.

Daniel Hamermesh explains how economics can be fun. There is a lot more than this example, but you must follow the link.

Is economics actually fun?

Oh gosh, yes! Of course it’s fun. Partly because it’s relevant, but partly because there are an awful lot of things that are basically just fun stories. I wrote a book, Economics is Everywhere, which contains stories from my life and things I see, designed to illustrate economic ideas. Some of them are just hilarious. And it’s not just me, whose humour is sort of weird, I admit. Almost anyone can read them and get a good laugh out of them, while learning something. And that’s the best way to teach, I think.

Can you give me your favourite example?

I have lots of favourites! It’s like choosing among my children. How off-colour are you allowed to be on this?

It’s completely up to you.

Every year 500 students in my introductory economics class have to write a story like the ones in my book. Last year one student wrote that it was three in the morning on a Sunday, and she was in the dormitory lounge having been “sexiled”. Her roommate had thrown her out of the room, for reasons that are implicit in that term. She argued that this was a wonderful example of what we call “externalities” – her roommate and the roommate’s boyfriend were making so much noise it was impossible to sleep there. Moreover, they were also disturbing people down the hall, because the walls are so thin. There’s also the question of who owns the rights to the room – this is called an issue of “property rights”. So what the girl illustrated was both the concept of an externality, and the notion of property rights in a very cute way. I thought that was a winner. It’s not the best, but it’s well up there. The top 10 each year out of the 500 get extra credit, and I steal a few stories for my book too, with full credit to them. …

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Gregg Easterbrook tells us what will happen if the super committee fails.

Action by the debt-reduction ‘super committee’ is due in less than a week. You will not be surprised to learn the super committee may only announce grandiose goals, while “deferring” specifics to some unspecified future point.

If, after months of hype, the super committee turns out to be a Potemkin committee, taking no action against the tide of government red ink, here is what will happen: Absolutely nothing.

That’s why falling dangerously arrears on national fiscal policy is so seductive – in the short term, nothing happens. Greece, Italy, Portugal – their governments made irresponsible decision after irresponsible decision, and nothing happened. So the irresponsible decisions continued.

America’s political leadership can continue to act irresponsibly about money for years to come, and absolutely nothing will happen … until it’s too late.

Consider an analogy to household finances. My wife and I are squares about money. We borrow conservatively, repay early, plan cautious budgets and won’t buy anything unless we know we can cover the cost within a short time. The result is a nice house that’s mostly our own equity, plus retirement savings and a strong credit rating. In fiscal terms, we are pretty much where the United States was a quarter century ago.

Suppose I ran out and bought a high-end sports car for me and a diamond brooch for her. This would be irresponsible, especially from the standpoint of our three children. What would happen the next day?

Absolutely nothing. I could break years of rigorous self-discipline about debt and short-term outlook, but pay no penalty at all. …

And George Will on the committee.  

Born during what is mistakenly called the debt-ceiling “debacle” last summer, the congressional supercommittee may die without agreeing to a 10-year, $1.2 trillion (at least) deficit-reduction plan. This is not properly labeled a failure. Committee Democrats demanded more revenue; Republicans offered $500 billion; Democrats responded with the one-syllable distillation of liberalism: “More!” So the committee’s work has been a clarifying event that presages a larger one — next November’s elections.

The messiness surrounding the debt-ceiling increase was what democracy looks like when belatedly confronting big problems. Remember, Barack Obama demanded, until doing so became politically untenable, a “clean” ceiling increase — no supercommittee or other threat to his spending torrent.

The supercommittee should by now have sent its plan to the Congressional Budget Office for “scoring” — calculation of the fiscal consequences of its proposals. The law establishing the committee requires any proposal to be published in legislative language 48 hours before Nov. 23. Not that law has much to do with fiscal matters: The Democratic-controlled Senate has not produced a budget in more than 930 days. This is just one way existing budget law is ignored.

Regarding the supercommittee, Harry Reid’s and Obama’s interests diverge. Imitation is the sincerest form of politics, and Obama needs congressional failure as he seeks reelection by emulating Harry Truman in 1948, running against a “do-nothing” Congress. Reid, however, wants to remain Senate majority leader. In 2012, Democrats will be defending 23 seats, Republicans only 10. Republicans need to gain just four seats to control the Senate. Reid’s members cannot relish running while Obama is denouncing the “Republican Congress.” As if the Democratic-controlled Senate has been temporarily disassociated from Congress. …

Spengler turns his attention to MF Global and corruption in DC.

Jon Corzine’s MF Global is missing $600 million of customer money, and the bankruptcy trustee has no idea when it might be found or when investors might be paid back, if ever. The New York Times today says that the investigation points to the conclusion that the firm simply misappropriated (that is, stole) customer money to back up failing bets on the distressed bonds of failing European governments.

The former head of Goldman Sachs and Democratic governor of New Jersey presided over a firm that may turn out to have been a criminal enterprise.  Maybe the Occupy Wall Street movement should shift venue to the headquarters of the Democratic Party, which has a long pattern of involvement in outright corruption.

If this is the case — and I will patiently await the results of investigation by the proper authorities before coming to any conclusion — the only proper thing to do would be to throw the book at Corzine and his colleagues and put some people in jail for a very, very long time. In response to corporate malfeasance and Wall Street’s misbehavior in the advent of the 2008 crisis, we have had a raft of new legislation and regulation — Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, the Volcker rules, and more minutiae than the battery of corporate lawyers hired by the banks can follow. My few friends still employed in the investment banking industry are making a fraction of what they once did, but their lawyers are getting fat. The last hiring bubble in Wall Street, I’m told, is in risk management and legal services. Remember what Mother used to say: “You can’t have any new laws until you use the old ones!”

There is overwhelming documentation that key Democratic Party figures used government sponsored enterprises — the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) — to corrupt Congress on a grand scale in order to pay themselves spectacular sums. Last year Gretchen Morgenson and Josh Rosner told the sordid story in their book Reckless Endangerment: …

Just for grins, David Warren lists some of the Occupiers’ demands.

… “Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. Unionize ALL workers immediately. … Raise the minimum wage immediately to $18/hr. … Institute a moratorium on all foreclosures and layoffs immediately. … Open the borders to all immigrants, legal or illegal. … Tax the very rich at rates up to 90 per cent. … Allow workers to elect their supervisors. …

Lower the retirement age to 55. Increase Social Security benefits. …

Ban the private ownership of land. … Immediate debt forgiveness for all. … Release all political prisoners immediately. … End the ‘War on Drugs’.”

That was a fairly representative sampling, from a very wide field, across which one might reply to every single demand, “You and whose army?” For, after all, the encampment in Zuccotti Park was unable to defeat even New York City bylaws. …

Roger Simon wants us to pay attention to foreign policy.

… I am leery of a president who is a foreign policy novice.

We have seen the results of that with the incumbent. America’s foreign policy has been between non-existent and disastrous during his administration. Our leadership in the world has diminished drastically, probably intentionally, and that is horrendous for the human race.

The examples are myriad (going after Ghaddafi while virtually ignoring the far more dangerous Assad; allowing, even encouraging, the fall of Mubarak leading to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere; playing footsie with increasingly Islamist Turkey; putting undue pressure on Israel and repeatedly disrespecting her prime minister; etc.) but I can’t recall a more despicable behavior by an American president in my lifetime than Barack Obama’s reaction — or should I say non-reaction — to the democracy movement in Iran. Who can forget the brave demonstrators in the streets shouting “Obama, Obama, are you with us or against us?”

Obama didn’t hear them, choosing instead to negotiate with Ahmadinejad. This ideologically ignorant and narcissistic decision, devoid even of basic human compassion, has helped put us in the position we are today with an Islamofascist Iran on the brink of nuclear weapons.

So what does this mean in terms of the Republican candidates? …

Regarding the cost of the GM bailout, Shikha Dalmia gets to say, “I told you so.”

Am I allowed to say, I told you so?

The Treasury Department yesterday revised its loss estimate for the Government Motors bailout from $14.33 billion to $23.6 billion, thanks to the company’s sinking stock price. GM’s Sept. 30 closing price, on which the new estimate is based, was $20.18, about $13 less than its December IPO price and $35 less than what is needed for taxpayers to break even.

The $23.6 billion represents a 25 percent loss on the feds $60 billion direct “investment” in GM. But that’s not all that taxpayers are on the hook for. As I explained previously, Uncle Sam’s special GM bankruptcy package allowed the company to write off $45 billion in previous losses going forward. This could work out to as much as $15 billion in tax savings that GM wouldn’t have had had it gone through a normal bankruptcy. Why? Because after bankruptcy, the tax liabilities of companies increase since they have no more losses to write off.

This means that the total hit to taxpayers, who still own about a quarter of the company, could add up to $38.6 billion. That’s even more that the $34 billion on the outside I had predicted in May.

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Investor’s.com editors react to the suggestion we have become “lazy.”

We’re starting to grasp how hard a job the president has. It can’t be easy to rule a country filled with so many soft, lazy, greedy fat cats who can’t make good stuff anymore.

At a business forum Saturday, President Obama complained that “we’ve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades.” He apparently meant we’ve let foreign investment go slack, since “we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America.”

But this is just the latest slur against the United States uttered by its leader.

In October, Obama complained that “we have lost our ambition, our imagination and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.” Earlier that month he groused that the U.S. “used to have the best stuff” but doesn’t anymore. In September he described America as having “gotten a little soft.”

And that’s when he hasn’t been complaining about greedy Wall Street executives who think they deserve to make a profit.

But calling America lazy is going too far.

First of all, foreign direct investment has more than tripled over the past two decades. So it’s hardly like businesses abroad haven’t noticed that the U.S. is a good place to invest.

And while the president might have been too busy writing autobiographies to notice, the past two decades have shown an America that is anything but soft or lazy. Since our president doesn’t seem to know about this, here’s a quick review: …

Craig Pirrong calls our attention to articles in WaPo and NYT about the dismal record of government investments in alternative energy projects. The Professor says if you’re surprised by the poor results then you might be an idiot.

… These failures were predictable–and in fact predicted.  But the predictions have been ignored.  For decades, as the WaPo article points out in excruciating detail.  Good money has been thrown after bad which had been thrown after worse.  These decisions have been driven by political economy rather than economic calculation.  If something needs a subsidy, that means it costs too much for the value it produces.  Yes, there can be circumstances in which there is some value that is not internalized by the producer, in which a subsidy may theoretically be justified.  But as the historical record makes abundantly clear, that’s not what drives how subsidies are allocated: they come out of the political sausage grinder, and it is politics and political connections that turn the crank.

Whatever you think about ExxonMobil, they deserve credit for not buying into the “beyond petroleum” moonshinery of BP and some other supermajors in the last decade.  During the Bush years, XOM CEOs Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson steadfastly refused to commit capital into renewables and alternative energy, and resisted playing the subsidy game: they were unabashedly an oil company, and didn’t pretend otherwise.  They had seen the boondoggles of the 1970s–remember Synfuels?–and didn’t want to squander valuable capital on similar boondoggles in the new millennium.  Unfortunately, Congress and two administrations–particularly the current one–haven’t been quite so perceptive.   As a result tens of billions of dollars have been wasted, and wasted predictably.

Here’s the Washington Post article. No surprise it is much better than the Times’.

Solyndra, the solar-panel maker that received more than half a billion dollars in federal loans from the Obama administration only to go bankrupt this fall, isn’t the first dud for U.S. government officials trying to play venture capitalist in the energy industry.

The Clinch River Breeder Reactor. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation. The hydrogen car. Clean coal. These are but a few examples spanning several decades — a graveyard of costly and failed projects.

Not a single one of these much-ballyhooed initiatives is producing or saving a drop or a watt or a whiff of energy, but they have managed to burn through far more taxpayer money than the ill-fated Solyndra. An Energy Department report in 2008 estimated that the federal government had spent $172 billion since 1961 on basic research and the development of advanced energy technologies.

What does Washington have to show for these investments? And should the government even be in the business of promoting particular energy technologies?

Some economists, executives and financiers — as well as Energy Secretary Steven Chu — argue that the government must play a role because certain technologies have non-financial benefits, such as producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions or easing U.S. reliance on foreign oil. The semiconductor industry is often held up as a model of how government money can help build a new type of economy.

But others argue that the history of government attempts to reach for the holy grail of new energy technology — a history that features both political parties — is not inspiring. “We’re making very large bets, and the decisions seem to be more grounded in politics and geography than in engineering and science,” said Michael Graetz, a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of “The End of Energy.”

Consider the saga of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon set a goal of building an experimental nuclear power plant. The Clinch River reactor was supposed to be a sort of perpetual motion machine, producing power as well as plutonium that could be used in other plants.

Private utilities agreed to kick in $175 million, less than half of the $400 million that the Atomic Energy Commission estimated it would cost to build. As expenses ballooned, the government covered all the overruns. The project was criticized by activists and scientists worried about the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. Cheap uranium undercut it.

After President Ronald Reagan was elected, Clinch River survived the first round of his spending cuts, in part out of deference to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), a strong supporter of the reactor, which was in his home state. But finally, in 1983, with the Congressional Budget Office saying the cost might exceed $4 billion, Congress terminated the program. Blueprints had been drawn up, modeling done, components ordered and some ground cleared, but the reactor was never built. The price tag for the federal government: $1.7 billion ($3.9 billion in today’s dollars).

Then there was the Synthetic Fuels Corporation. …

More on DC corruption from Marc Thiessen’s OpEd book review also in the Post.

… Perhaps the most disturbing revelations come from Schweizer’s investigation into the Obama Energy Department and its infamous “green energy” loan guarantee and grant programs, a program Schweizer calls “the greatest — and most expensive — example of crony capitalism in American history.” The scandal surrounding Solyndra — the now-bankrupt, Obama-connected solar power company that received a federally guaranteed loan of $573 million — is well known. But Solyndra, Schweizer says, is only the tip of the iceberg.

According to his research, at least 10 members of President Obama’s campaign finance committee and more than a dozen of his campaign bundlers were big winners in getting tax dollars from these programs. One chart in the book details how the 10 finance committee members collectively raised $457,834, and were in turn approved for grants or loans of nearly $11.4 billion — quite a return on their investment.

In the loan-guarantee program alone, Schweizer writes, “$16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers — individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party.” That is a staggering 71 percent of the loan money.

Schweizer cites example after example of companies that received grants or loans and documents their financial connections to the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party. And he shows how “the [Energy] department’s loan and grant programs are run by partisans who were responsible for raising money during the Obama campaign from the same people who later came to seek government loans and grants.”

There is much, much more, which means that when Schweizer’s book hits stores Tuesday, heads in Washington are going to explode.

William McGurn notes how special crony capitalism is in Chicago. 

New York gave us banks too big to fail. Washington bequeathed us Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Still, when it comes to crony capitalism, no one quite matches Chicago.

Soon the Illinois state legislature will meet in special session to consider the Chicago machine’s latest favor: legislation designed to deliver tax relief to three of the state’s largest companies. These tax breaks for the lucky few come just 10 months after the Illinois legislature approved what has been described as the largest tax increase in the state’s history. It’s no coincidence that both have been supported by Gov. Pat Quinn and other top leaders of the state’s Democratic Party.

In so doing, Chicago is giving America a window into the logic of crony capitalism: Raise taxes on everyone—and then cut side deals with those big enough to lobby for special relief.

The legislature is considering this limited tax relief because three corporate mainstays of greater Chicago have threatened to leave without it. One is the CME Group, operator of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world’s largest futures exchange by volume. Another is the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the world’s largest options exchange. The last is Sears, one of America’s oldest and most famous retailing giants.  …

David Harsanyi says, “Constitutional or not, ObamaCare has to go!!”

Is not doing something the same as doing it, and should government be allowed to force you not to do the thing you’re already not doing by making you do it so you don’t not do it anymore?

That is just one of the perplexing legal questions the Supreme Court will likely find a way to say “yes” to in July after it wrestles with the constitutionality of Obamacare.

Once the court upholds the individual mandate — a provision that allows politicians to coerce citizens to purchase products in private markets (or, in this case, state-backed monopolies) — we will have precedent that puts few limits on the reach of Washington and crony capitalism. And beyond policy, Obamacare demonstrated why we should be cynical about government.

I suppose it starts with process. Obamacare was shoved through the sludge of parliamentary trickery, lies, horse trading, cooked-up numbers and false promises. Even after waiting to see what was in the bill, as Nancy Pelosi suggested, there was a historic electoral backlash. (Some people just don’t know what’s good for them.)

As for the court’s decision, it probably won’t imbue many people with any more confidence in process. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan — only recently charged with defending the administration’s positions in federal courts as solicitor general, working there while the health care law was being written and picking the legal team to defend it — will be rendering her entirely untainted decision on the matter.

Nor, as we learned this week, is it reassuring to find out that while the House was debating passage of Obamacare, Kagan and well-known legal scholar Laurence Tribe, then in the Justice Department, did a little dialoguing regarding the health care vote, and according to documents obtained by Media Research Center, Kagan wrote: “I hear they have the votes, Larry!! Simply amazing.”

Nothing says impartiality like double exclamation points!! …

Andrew Malcolm has late-night humor.

Fallon: The Miami Dolphins won their first NFL game this year! My grandma was so happy, mostly because she’s the Dolphins starting quarterback.

Fallon: The AFLAC duck balloon debuts in Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade this year. You think that’s weird. Wait til you see the balloon for that old guy from the Cialis ad.

Letterman: Kim Kardashian had a quiet intimate meeting with her new husband in Minnesota last week. It was just him, Kim, the cameraman, the sound guy, the makeup artist, a publicist, the cue card holder, the grip and, of course, the teamster driver.

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Mark Steyn thinks we could do more to live up to our slogans.

Whenever I write in these pages about the corrosive effect of Big Government upon the citizenry in Britain, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere and note that this republic is fairly well advanced upon the same grim trajectory, I get a fair few letters on the lines of: “You still don’t get it, Steyn. Americans aren’t Europeans. Or Canadians. We’re not gonna take it.”

I would like to believe it. It’s certainly the case that Americans have more attitude than anybody else — or, at any rate, attitudinal slogans. I saw a fellow in a “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt the other day. He was at LaGuardia, and he was being trod all over, by the obergropinfuhrers of the TSA, who had decided to subject him to one of their enhanced pat-downs. There are few sights more dismal than that of a law-abiding citizen having his genitalia pawed by state commissars, but him having them pawed while wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt is certainly one of them.

Don’t get me wrong. I like “Don’t Tread on Me.” Also, “Don’t Mess with Texas” — although the fact that 70 percent of births in Dallas’s largest hospital are Hispanic suggests that someone has messed with Texas in recent decades, and fairly comprehensively.

In my own state, the Department of Whatever paid some fancypants advertising agency a couple of million bucks to devise a new tourism slogan. They came up with “You’re Going To Love It Here!,” mailed it in, and cashed the check. The state put it up on the big “Bienvenue au New Hampshire” sign on I-93 on the Massachusetts border, and ten minutes later outraged Granite Staters were demanding it be removed and replaced with “Live Free or Die.” So it was. Americans are still prepared to get in-your-face about their in-your-face slogans. …

Toby Harnden says the whiff of scandal is wafting over the administration.

… the appearance of Attorney General Eric Holder on Capitol Hill last week underlined the problems that Obama faces in his re-election bid as he attempts to portray himself as an honest broker who rises above partisan politics – just as Tony “pretty much a straight kind of guy” Blair before him.

Holder was schooled in the last Democratic administration and his word-parsing performance was certainly one of Clintonian virtuosity. In a February letter, Holder’s department denied that illegal guns had been allowed into Mexico. Now that this had been revealed as untrue, Holder carefully conceded that the letter “could have been better crafted” and blamed ATF officials.

His recollection in May that he had first heard about Fast and Furious in the “past few weeks” had been mistaken, he admitted. “I should probably have said a couple of months.” He insisted that he did not read 2010 briefings about the operation that were addressed to him.

Asked whether he would apologise to Agent Terry’s family, to whom he has never spoken, he declined, preferring instead the formulation once favoured by Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, when asked about IRA atrocities. “I certainly regret what happened to Agent Terry,” he said.

By this weekend, Holder had decided he would say “sorry” to the Terry family and offered to meet them while at the same time slamming Republicans for using “inflammatory and inappropriate rhetoric about the operation in an effort to score political points”. …

An example of the above, from the Washington Post.

The Obama administration urged officers of the struggling solar company Solyndra to postpone announcing planned layoffs until after the November 2010 midterm elections, newly released e-mails show.

Solyndra, the now-shuttered California company, had been a poster child of President Obama’s initiative to invest in clean energies and received the administration’s first energy loan of $535 million. But a year ago, in October 2010, the solar panel manufacturer was quickly running out of money and had warned the Energy Department it would need emergency cash to avoid having to shut down.

The new e-mails about the layoff announcement were released Tuesday morning as part of a House Energy and Commerce committee memo, provided in advance of Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s scheduled testimony before the investigative committee Thursday.

Solyndra’s chief executive warned the Energy Department on Oct. 25, 2010, that he intended to announce worker layoffs Oct. 28. He said he was spurred by numerous calls from reporters and potential investors about rumors the firm was in financial trouble and was planning to lay off workers and close one of its two plants.

But in an Oct. 30, 2010, e-mail, advisers to Solyndra’s primary investor, Argonaut Equity, explain that the Energy Department had strongly urged the company to put off the layoff announcement until Nov. 3. The midterm elections were held Nov. 2, …

Pajamas Media post says Romney/McDonnell is a done deal.

It’s a done deal! It’s a slam dunk! You can just about start printing the bumper stickers for the 2012 Republican presidential ticket. For as a result of last week’s GOP debate and a Virginia legislative election, the Romney/McDonnell ticket has been solidified.

Mitt Romney, the inevitable Republican presidential nominee, has become even more so as a result of Rick Perry’s debate implosion. (Otherwise known as the “56 second brain freeze” that rocked the world.)

Romney looks and sounds presidential and is by default going to be the last man standing after Cain-mania settles down. This is not exactly pleasing to the conservative base, but there is “hope and change” coming for conservatives on the 2012 ticket and his name is Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia.

Governor McDonnell took a well-deserved victory lap this past week after helping the Republican Party of Virginia win control of both the Virginia General Assembly and Virginia Senate. This huge legislative victory, won with tea party support, catapults McDonnell right into Romney’s number two slot.

But for McDonnell, these favorable Virginia election results are only the cherry on top of the sundae. There are five other important reasons why McDonnell will be Romney’s running mate, served up for coronation at the 2012 Republican nominating convention in Tampa.

1. Governor Bob McDonnell is a conservative who conservatives trust.

McDonnell can make a Romney-topped ticket more palatable to the tea party/conservative base. The base currently does not trust Romney but with McDonnell as his VP, McDonnell can help “sell” Romney and soften the blow for conservatives nationally, while not scaring away moderate voters

2. Virginia is a must-win-back state for the GOP.

Obama won Virginia in 2008 by 7 percentage points, but with Governor McDonnell’s high approval rating of 62%, Romney can count on him to return Virginia into the red column where it had been for forty years since 1968.

Obama will throw everything he has at Virginia but McDonnell will triumph. Already, Tuesday’s Virginia election results are considered a bad omen for Obama nationally. …

While we’ve been looking elsewhere, a revolution has been going on in on line education. Wall Street Journal has the story.

It was nearing lunchtime on a recent Thursday, and ninth-grader Noah Schnacky of Windermere, Fla., really did not want to go to algebra. So he didn’t.

Tipping back his chair, he studied a computer screen listing the lessons he was supposed to complete that week for his public high school—a high school conducted entirely online. Noah clicked on his global-studies course. A lengthy article on resource shortages popped up. He gave it a quick scan and clicked ahead to the quiz, flipping between the article and multiple-choice questions until he got restless and wandered into the kitchen for a snack.

Noah would finish the quiz later, within the three-hour time frame that he sets aside each day for school. He also listened to most of an online lecture given by his English teacher; he could hear but not see her as she explained the concept of a protagonist to 126 ninth graders logged in from across the state. He never got to the algebra.

His sister Allison, meanwhile, has spent the past two hours working on an essay in the kitchen. She has found a new appreciation of history. At her old school, she says, the teacher stood at the blackboard and droned, and history was “the boringest class ever.” Now, thanks to the videos she’s been watching on ancient Egypt, she loves it.

In a radical rethinking of what it means to go to school, states and districts nationwide are launching online public schools that let students from kindergarten to 12th grade take some—or all—of their classes from their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. Other states and districts are bringing students into brick-and-mortar schools for instruction that is largely computer-based and self-directed.

In just the past few months, Virginia has authorized 13 new online schools. Florida began requiring all public-high-school students to take at least one class online, partly to prepare them for college cybercourses. Idaho soon will require two. In Georgia, a new app lets high-school students take full course loads on their iPhones and BlackBerrys. Thirty states now let students take all of their courses online.

Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools, up 40% in the last three years, according to Evergreen Education Group, a consulting firm that works with online schools. More than two million pupils take at least one class online, according to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a trade group. …

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Caroline Glick writes on the Netanyahu slurs by the French and American presidents.

The slurs against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu voiced by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and US President Barack Obama after last week’s G20 summit were revealing as well as repugnant.

Thinking no one other than Obama could hear him, Sarkozy attacked Netanyahu, saying, “I can’t stand to see him anymore, he’s a liar.”

Obama responded by whining, “You’re fed up with him, but me, I have to deal with him every day.”

These statements are interesting both for what they say about the two presidents’ characters and for what they say about the way that Israel is perceived by the West more generally.

To understand why this is the case it is necessary to first ask, when has Netanyahu ever lied to Sarkozy and Obama? This week the UN International Atomic Energy Agency’s report about Iran’s nuclear weapons program made clear that Israel – Netanyahu included – has been telling the truth about Iran and its nuclear ambitions all along. In contrast, world leaders have been lying and burying their heads in the sand.

Since Iran’s nuclear weapons program was first revealed to the public in 2004, Israel has provided in-depth intelligence information proving Iran’s malign intentions to the likes of Sarkozy, Obama and the UN. And for seven years, the US government – Obama included – has claimed that it lacked definitive proof of Iran’s intentions.

Obama wasted the first two years of his administration attempting to charm the Iranians out of their nuclear weapons program. He stubbornly ignored the piles of evidence presented to him by Israel that Iran was not interested in cutting a deal.

Perhaps Obama was relying on the US’s 2007 National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. As Israel said at the time, and as this week’s IAEA report proves, it was the NIE – which claimed that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 – not Israel that deliberately lied about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was the US intelligence community that purposely deceived the American government and people about the gravest immediate threat to US national security.

Israel, including Netanyahu, was telling the truth. …

Power Line posts on the Keystone Pipeline non-decision.

President Obama’s announcement that he will delay a decision on approval of the Keystone Pipeline until after the 2012 election typifies his feckless presidency. Torn between the need to create jobs, reduce the cost of energy and get our economy going on one hand, and the emotional biases of his environmentalist base on the other, Obama punted. I assume that if and when the time comes–post-election–Obama will do what he has wanted to do all along, and kill the pipeline.

We have written about Keystone a number of times. In this post, we quoted a study that concluded the pipeline would moderate the price of oil and create between 250,000 and 553,000 permanent American jobs. Here, we quoted at length another study of the beneficial effect of the pipeline on our economy, along with related energy development policies. There simply is no doubt that building the pipeline and transporting Canadian oil efficiently to refineries in the U.S. would give our economy a major boost.

I don’t suppose anyone remembers the speech that President Obama gave in support of his “Jobs Act” on September 7–ancient history, I know–and it is almost cruel to remind this inept president of his own words. This is what we wrote at the time: …

Walter Russell Mead thinks the president may regret his pipeline punt.

… The President may think he’s dodging a bullet by putting off his decision until after the election, but he has given the GOP a big pre-Christmas present, one that will go on giving as long as unemployment is a major political issue.

The nexus of environmental policy and jobs has been a kind of Bermuda Triangle for this administration, where good intentions go awry and the best laid plans misfire.  The failure of Solyndra demonstrated the poverty of “green jobs” initiatives, while the economic success of states like North Dakota and Texas are a testament to the continued effectiveness of old-style brown jobs. The President may be retreating from his failed green jobs plans, but still appears reluctant to embrace the more successful brown ones.

If times are good by 2012, voters may vote their green hopes.  If the economy is (as seems likely) still a problem, they will be voting their less verdant fears.  This may be one can the White House will come to regret having kicked down the road.

More from Canada’s Financial Post.

President Barack Obama has kicked the can down the road by postponing permission to build Canada’s Keystone XL oil sands pipeline to Texas until 2013, after the next election.

This decision, in essence, strands the oil sands indefinitely and shuts it out of the U.S. market for years, if not forever.

It’s being billed as a temporary setback, but it’s a major and devastating development.

The excuse is that a new route is going to be sought to avoid putting pipelines across the aquifer that straddles mid-America. The reality is that the environmental movement, not an aquifer, straddles the United States and cannot be circumvented. The Keystone, and Canada’s oil sands, has become the environmental movement’s line in the sand in a battle to shut down fossil fuel usage even though there are no alternative fuels for 20 or 30 more years.

These Keystone Cops have scored a victory that likely marks the beginning of a de facto pipeline moratorium south of the border. And this could cripple America’s economy and energy industries.

Keystone has received approvals over a number of years from dozens of environmental and other government agencies, been scrutinized more than other project and yet, in the end, has had its permit postponed on environmental grounds. …

Just like the Soviets, the president likes everything big; government, labor and business. Fred Barnes has the story.

By his own account, President Obama is the champion and protector of the little guy. He said last week he wants no one left “in a second-class status in this United States of America.” He’s “determined” to “make sure that nobody out there is going bankrupt just because somebody in their family is getting sick.” He’s committed to making Washington “responsive to the needs of people, not the needs of special interests [and] not just people who are hurting now, but also responsive to future generations.” Obama identifies himself with the 99 percent.

Yet the winners in the nearly three years of Obama’s presidency are the big guys?—?big business, big labor, and big government. Corporate profits have reached record levels. The influence of the biggest labor unions has surged in Washington, where it matters most. The federal government has grown in size and reach.

Meanwhile, the weak economy has hurt small business, the country’s number one job creator. Temporary tax breaks haven’t helped, and the threat of new taxes and a fresh barrage of regulations have put a crimp in expansion and hiring. Big business isn’t expanding or hiring much either. A headline in Slate reflected this: “More Profits, Fewer Jobs.” 

Labor leaders have entrée at the White House and federal departments and agencies as never before. The most frequent visitor to the White House in Obama’s first year was Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union. The president delayed trade treaties with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia until they were altered to satisfy labor officials. If Obama understands that higher levels of unionization are associated with greater joblessness, he’s never let on.

Big government is a cliché that’s all the more true in the Obama era. Federal employment grew by 140,800 in Obama’s first two years, and the clout of federal officialdom has increased substantially. …

George Mason econ prof Tyler Cowen reviews a new book on Keynes and Hayek.

Keynes vs. Hayek” has turned out to be a more durable theme than could have been expected in the 1930s. As recently as the 1990s, big-time macroeconomic debates seemed to be over forever; the Nineties seem now like a very long time ago.

On the side of Hayek, Glenn Beck propelled The Road to Serfdom to No. 1 on Amazon with his repeated warnings that President Obama was bringing socialism to the United States. The man overseeing the Federal Reserve in the House of Representatives, Ron Paul (R., Texas), is an avowed fan of Hayek’s 1970s “denationalization of money” idea.

On the other side, Paul Krugman, through his New York Times column and blog, has revived the fortunes of Keynesian economics by insisting that we are suffering from a shortfall of spending or “aggregate demand.” A big swath of the economics profession has become more Keynesian in the last five years. Krugman, Brad DeLong, and other writers devote a lot of energy to attacking the Hayekian vision of macroeconomics, which by now is over 80 years old; Krugman coined the now-current term “Austerian” to describe those who believe in both Hayek’s “Austrian” economics and a policy of fiscal austerity.

Most notoriously, Hayek and Keynes square off in two rap videos, produced by economist Russ Roberts and filmmaker John Papola. The first video has received over two and a half million views and the second, released this year, is already over 1 million views. The auteurs present both sides of the debate, but a careful viewing of the second video shows that while Hayek wins the fight, analogized in terms of a boxing match, the referee calls it for Keynes. In July, the London School of Economics staged an actual Hayek vs. Keynes debate, with contemporary scholars filling the roles.

So what’s all the fuss about? Nicholas Wapshott’s new book, Keynes Hayek, does an excellent job of setting out the broader history behind this revival of the old debates. …

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Mark Steyn on the contemptible ones and their budget tricks.

Have you been following this so-called Supercommittee? They’re the new superhero group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss. There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt.  The Supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.

I had cynically assumed that the Superfriends would address America’s imminent debt catastrophe with some radical reform – such as, say, slowing the increase in spending by raising the age for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 47 to 49 by the year 2137, after which triumph we could all go back to sleep until total societal collapse.

But I underestimated the genius of the Superfriends’ Supercommittee.  It turns out that a committee created to reduce the deficit is, instead, going to increase it. As The Hill reported:

“Democrats on the supercommittee have proposed that the savings from the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be used to pay for a new stimulus package, according to a summary of the $2.3 trillion plan obtained by The Hill.”

Do you follow that? Let the Congressional Budget Office explain it to you:

“The budget savings from ending the wars are estimated to total around $1 trillion over a decade, according to an estimate in July from the Congressional Budget Office.”

Let us note in passing that, according to the official CBO estimates, a whole decade’s worth of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan adds up to little more than Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill.  But, aside from that, in what sense are these “savings”? The Iraq war is ended – or, at any rate, “ended,” at least as far as U.S. participation in it is concerned. How then can congressional accountants claim to be able to measure “savings” in 2021 from a war that ended a decade earlier? And why stop there? Why not estimate around $2 trillion in savings by 2031? After all, that would free up even more money for a bigger stimulus package. wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t cost us anything because it would all be “savings.”

Come to think of it, didn’t the Second World War end in 1945? Could we have the CBO score the estimated two-thirds of a century of “budget savings” we’ve saved since ending that war? We could use the money to fund free Master’s degrees in Complacency and Self-Esteem Studies for everyone, and that would totally stimulate the economy. The Spanish-American War ended 103 years ago, so imagine how much cash has already piled up! Like they say at Publishers’ Clearing House, you may already have won! …

Think Mark Steyn is over-wrought? Here’s historian Niall Ferguson;

… So why should Americans care about any of this? The first reason is that, with American consumers still in the doldrums of deleveraging, the United States badly needs buoyant exports if its economy is to grow at anything other than a miserably low rate. And despite all the hype about trade with the Chinese, U.S. exports to the European Union are nearly three times larger than to China.

Until March, it seemed as if exports to Europe were on an upward trajectory. But the eurozone crisis has stopped that. Governments that ran up excessive debts have seen their borrowing costs explode. Unable to devalue their currencies, they’ve been forced to adopt austerity measures—cutting spending or hiking taxes—in a vain effort to reduce their deficits. The result has been Depression economics: shrinking economies and unemployment rates approaching 20 percent.

As a result, according to the new president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, a “double dip” recession in Europe is now all but inevitable. And that’s lousy news for U.S. exporters targeting the EU market.

But there’s more. Europe’s problem is not just that governments are overborrowed. There are an unknown number of European banks that are effectively insolvent if their holdings of government bonds are “marked to market”—in other words, valued at their current rock-bottom market prices. …

Joe Nocera on the real scandal at Penn State.

… Big-time college football requires grown men to avert their eyes from the essential hypocrisy of the enterprise. Coaches take home multimillion-dollar salaries, while the players who make them rich don’t even get “scholarships” that cover the full cost of attending college. They push their “student-athletes” to take silly courses that won’t get in the way of football. When players are seriously injured and can no longer play, their coaches often yank their scholarships, forcing them to drop out of school.

“College football and men’s basketball has drifted so far away from the educational purpose of the university,” James Duderstadt, a former president of the University of Michigan, told me recently. “They exploit young people and prevent them from getting a legitimate college education. They place the athlete’s health at enormous risk, which becomes apparent later in life. We are supposed to be developing human potential, not making money on their backs. Football strikes at the core values of a university.”

It is true that Joe Paterno ran a better program than most, and that no university outside of Notre Dame has benefited more from having a football team than Penn State. Its football renown helped turn a small-time state school into an important research university. But it is also true that, in 2009, Penn State football generated a staggering $50 million in profit on $70 million in revenue, according to figures compiled by the Department of Education. Protecting those profits is the real core value of college football — at Penn State and everywhere else.

What goes on in the typical big-time college football program constitutes abuse of the athletes who play the game. It’s not sexual abuse, to be sure, but it’s wrong just the same. For 46 years, Joe Paterno averted his eyes to the daily injustices, large and small, that his players suffered — just like Nick Saban does at Alabama and Steve Spurrier at South Carolina, and all the rest of them. When Paterno averted his eyes from Jerry Sandusky, he was just doing what came naturally as a college football coach.

A Corner Post on an outrage.

If you’re a parent who accepts Medicaid payments from the State of Michigan to help support your mentally-disabled adult children, you qualify as a state employee for the purposes of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). They can now claim and receive a portion of your Medicaid in the form of union dues.

Robert and Patricia Haynes live in Michigan with their two adult children, who have cerebral palsy. The state government provides the family with insurance through Medicaid, but also treats them as caregivers. For the SEIU, this makes them public employees and thus members of the union, which receives $30 out of the family’s monthly Medicaid subsidy. The Michigan Quality Community Care Council (MQC3) deducts union dues on behalf of SEIU…

Mr. and Mrs. Haynes, of course, are both the parents (the employer) and the health care providers for their children, but they still lose money to the SEIU every month, despite having no interest in joining the union. They have been arbitrarily classified as state employees so that the union can take money from them.

A student at Clemson on the waste involved in ethanol.

… Negative consequences of ethanol abound.  

Ethanol production increases the price of corn used for food. The price of corn is skyrocketing, which raises the price of all corn-based products. 24% of the U.S. corn crop is now mandated to go to ethanol, which is causing shocks to global markets as third-world nations must pay more for this food staple. Ethanol production competes with land space for other food products, using an estimated 11 acres worth of land per vehicle fueled by ethanol per year.

Ethanol appears to be “environmentally friendly,” but it is not.

Ethanol releases 19% more carbon dioxide than gasoline. For those who believe that human-produced carbon dioxide plays a role in global climate change, this is not a good statistic.

Ethanol production requires enormous water resources. According to the Water Education Foundation, a pound of corn requires 118 gallons of water to grow. Given the 21 pounds of corn required to produce one gallon of ethanol, that’s almost 2500 gallons of water used, not including water in the distillation stage. So when filling their gas tanks, most Americans now indirectly consume over 2500 gallons of water. …

Shorts from National Review

On Halloween, according to the U.N., the world’s population hit an estimated 7 billion. All the predictable hand-wringing ensued from all the predictable quarters, though by this point the anguished response has a ritualistic quality, since it was the fourth time the odometer has turned over since Paul Ehrlich’s hysterical 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb ignited a wave of neo-Malthusianism. Malthus’s and Ehrlich’s argument was simple: Fixed amount of arable land, ever-increasing population, result starvation. Yet while the world’s capacity to feed people may not be infinite, there is no reason to believe that 6 or 7 or 10 billion is anywhere near the limit. It is now clear that science can expand agricultural production greatly; that starvation is almost always the result of bad government, not finite resources; and that prosperity and modernity, especially the education of women, will lead to a natural decrease in birth rates. So we greet Baby 7B by saying the more the merrier, and hoping his or her generation will realize that the best fix for the purported ills of overpopulation is not planned economies, forced wealth transfers, or draconian limits on family size, but technology, democracy, and free markets.

An enduring problem for liberal presidents is that the people they govern just cannot seem to rise to the chief executive’s high standards of idealism and self-sacrifice. The canonical expression of liberal presidential disappointment in us, the citizenry, was Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “malaise” speech: “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” etc. Now we are hearing similar complaints from Barack Obama. Back in September, he told an interviewer that we have “gotten a little soft.” Then here he was the other day at a fundraiser in San Francisco saying that “we have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.” Well, Mr. President, our willingness to do those things sprang from the desire to improve our lives and those of our fellow citizens through honest individual enterprise — the motive force for all our nation’s progress. Since that desire is presumably a human universal, we should ask what is currently stifling it. The answers are not hard to find: excessive regulation, taxation, and litigation. Is there any prospect of this triple burden’s being lightened? Not under Barack Obama’s administration. …

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Looking at last week’s election results, Charles Krauthammer says 2012 will be a struggle for the forces of  – - – truth, justice, and the American Way.

The 2011 off-year elections are a warning to Republicans. The 2010 party is over. 2012 will be a struggle. …

… Tuesday showed that the powerful Republican tailwind of 2010 (I prefer non-culinary metaphors) is now becalmed. Between now and November 2012, things can break either way.

They have already been breaking every which way. In this year’s congressional special elections resulting from the resignation of scandal-embroiled incumbents, New York-26, traditionally conservative, went Democratic; New York-9, forever Democratic, went Republican. Add now the four evenly split gubernatorial races and Ohio’s split decision on its two highly ideological initiatives — and you approach equipoise.

Nothing is written. Contrary to the condescending conventional wisdom, the American electorate is no angry herd, prepared to stampede on the command of today’s most demagogic populist. Mississippi provided an exemplary case of popular sophistication — it defeated a state constitutional amendment declaring that personhood begins at fertilization. Voters were concerned about the measure’s ambiguity (which would grossly empower unelected judges) and its myriad unintended consequences (regarding, for example, infertility treatment and life-threatening ectopic pregnancies). Remarkably, this rejection was carried out by an electorate decidedly pro-life.

And smart. So too across the nation, as we saw Tuesday. This is no disoriented, easily led citizenry. On the contrary. It is thoughtful and discriminating. For Republicans, this means there is no coasting to victory, 9 percent unemployment or not. They need substance. They need an articulate candidate with an agenda and command of the issues who is light on slogans and lighter still on baggage.

But, Kimberley Strassel celebrates GOP wins in Virginia.

… the White House is pouring resources into what Tim Kaine, the state’s former Democratic governor, now pridefully refers to as Democrats’ “New Dominion.” The Obama campaign has held some 1,600 events in the state in the last half-year alone. Only last month Mr. Obama hopped a three-day bus trip through Virginia and North Carolina. Obama officials keep flocking to the state, and Tuesday’s election was to offer the first indication of how these efforts are succeeding.

Let’s just say the New Dominion is looking an awful lot like the Old Dominion. If anything, more so.

Virginia Republicans added seven new seats to their majority in the House of Delegates, giving them two-thirds of that chamber’s votes—the party’s largest margin in history. The GOP also took over the Virginia Senate in results that were especially notable, given that Virginia Democrats this spring crafted an aggressive redistricting plan that had only one aim: providing a firewall against a Republican takeover of that chamber. Even that extreme gerrymander didn’t work.

Every Republican incumbent—52 in the House, 15 in the Senate—won. The state GOP is looking at unified control over government for only the second time since the Civil War. This is after winning all three top statewide offices—including the election of Gov. Bob McDonnell—in 2009, and picking off three U.S. House Democrats in last year’s midterms.

Topline figures aside, what ought to really concern the White House was the nature of the campaign, and the breakout of Tuesday’s election data. Mr. Obama may have big plans for Virginia, but the question is increasingly: him and what army? …

David Harsanyi, in reference to Rick Perry’s faux pas, thinks it’s unlikely anyone is going to abolish federal departments.

… Remember that it is within these agencies that regulatory regimes blossom and economic growth is inhibited, where winners and loser are picked, where subsidies are handed out, where bad policy is implemented, and where nannies concoct their plans. This bureaucratic outbreak hit the nation under FDR and has yet to be put down.

So there is a legitimate argument for reducing the power of these agencies but it’s not going to happen anytime soon. To begin with no president is going to have the power to come in and shut them down – not today. Moreover, none of these Republicans candidates – including Perry – have the skills, the support and the political backbone to do the job. And I don’t believe any of them would even try.

Fortunately, or tragically, there are plenty of pressing and real problems they can tackle. Give us a real plan for reforming entitlements, for cutting spending and for creating a more prosperous atmosphere for the economy. Talk of shutting down departments is a convenient position but it’s also a platitudinous one that makes a candidate look unserious.

Craig Pirrong, the Streetwise Professor wants to make sure we don’t ignore the importance of Bill Daley getting his sails trimmed at the White House.

… Daley was seen by many in corporate America as someone who would serve as a counterweight to Obama’s leftist instincts.  That’s obviously not going to happen.  And that’s why this story deserves more attention than it has gotten.  It is an indication of where Obama is going. (And just to make clear: I am no fan of Daleyesque corporatism.)

I also surmise that there’s another thing going on here, a Chicago game.  Although Chicago is a One Party State, that party is rent into factions that barely coexist at the best of times, and battle viciously at others.  Obama’s alter ego, Valerie Jarrett, and Daley are from opposing, hostile, factions.  Jarrett was not pleased by Daley’s presence.  Jarrett is a hardcore progressive.  Daley’s goal–as described by Chait–was to soften the progressivism.

Daley’s departure likely marks Jarrett’s victory.  It also signals, as Chait suggests, a turn to a more hardcore progressive policy and strategy: if Jarrett has the wheel, there ain’t going to be any right turns.  It is a move towards the Occupy types and a move away from the corporatist, Democratic party establishment personified by Daley.

Helluva choice, eh?

But it means that the next 12 months will be even more confrontational and contentious, and the next election will be among the most divisive in recent history.  I’m thinking ‘68, or something in the 19th century divisive.

Today saw another indication of Obama’s choice.  He has delayed consideration of the Keystone Pipeline from Canada to the US.  This represents another genuflection to Obama’s environmentalist, leftist base. …

Yuval Levin has more.

… The move certainly suggests a continuing difficulty to manage the tension between the president’s two almost equally delusional self images—the pragmatic centrist reaching out to Republicans and the populist progressive fighting for the people against the powerful. These two approaches would require two quite different kinds of political strategies, and each would be well served by a different kind of chief of staff. Of course, President Obama is not actually a pragmatic centrist (witness everything he did in his first two years, his attitude and substantive proposals in every confrontation with this congress, and his assertions that Republicans want dirty air and water and would love to give mercury poisoning to children, for instance), and is not actually a populist progressive (witness his deep ties to and reliance on Wall Street and his overall regulatory agenda which basically amounts to institutionalized crony capitalism, for instance). Rather, he is an elitist liberal technocrat whose definition of pragmatism is agreement with him and whose idea of populism is resentment of people who disagree with him. It’s hard to fathom what the appropriate political strategy (and the appropriate chief of staff) for that sort of president should look like, so it’s not hard to see why he hasn’t found one.

Even so, and even if the president has concluded that Bill Daley is not the right chief for him at this moment, which is certainly his prerogative, just purely as a matter of managing his administration this kind of demotion is peculiar. President Obama came into office with no experience as an executive, and his style of management suggests that nearly three years in office may have given him only the wrong kind of experience. This latest move seems like one he will soon regret.

Of course, Andrew Malcolm has a more humorous take on the Daley demotion.

William Daley, President Obama’s chief of staff-in-name-only-now-because-we-don’t-want-a-mess-of-media-stories-about-bureaucratic-infighting-on-the-sinking-White-House-ship, is still employed today because he’s from Chicago and his family has been very good to Barack Obama and those around him for a long time.

That’s the way Daley’s father ran the Cook County machine all those years. And the same for Daley’s brother, who just retired as mayor last spring, leaving the job for Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who was hired more than two decades ago by the White House Daley to help the Chicago Daley.

That was before the Chicago Daley hired Michelle Robinson to help his chief of staff Valerie Jarrett, which was before Ms. Robinson became Mrs. Obama, which was before President Obama hired Ms. Jarrett as a key Oval Office aide.

Perhaps you get a sense of how professionally incestuous is the Chicago Democratic machine, now with a branch office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Machine ties can be broken only by betrayal or federal indictment …

We go to the Daily Beast to see the move in the eyes of card-carrying creepy liberals like Eleanor Clift.

Washington loves a good story about White House intrigue, who’s up and who’s down, and so the news that Chief of Staff Bill Daley would be giving up a portion of his duties had everyone speculating about the real reason for the mini-shakeup. Not surprisingly, Press Secretary Jay Carney cautioned reporters not to make too much of what he minimized as merely a move to make the White House run more efficiently. He said it was Daley’s idea to shed some of his responsibilities, and to have another of the president’s men, Pete Rouse, a seasoned congressional hand, take on more of the day-to-day management of the White House.

But wait, this is Washington, and nobody gives up power willingly, so here’s what happened, according to people who know the players. Daley was always miscast. He’s a Chicago businessman, accustomed to being in charge and impatient with Congress. He got much of the blame for the debt-ceiling debacle last summer that brought the government to the brink of default. While that took its toll, it was not fatal, says a Daley friend. “What was fatal: the accumulated weight of not moving the needle.”

In other words, with President Obama’s approval rating stuck in the low 40s, and nothing seeming to move the numbers, the shift to the center that Daley symbolized when he was brought into the White House in January was scrapped for a populist bid to reclaim the Democratic base. The result: Daley was not happy.

According to a veteran lobbyist, word got back to the White House that the chief of staff was up on Capitol Hill distancing himself from the president, saying, “They’re not listening to me.” That’s a cardinal sin for a White House adviser, and in a city where the buildings have ears, it’s not one that stays hidden for long.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, posted on his blog the possible reasons why Herman Cain continues to poll well.

… Consider all of the employee lawsuits and out of court settlements of which you have personal knowledge. Your list can include sexual harassment claims plus all other types of employee claims, including cases involving injuries and unfair practices. Include only situations in which you were personally involved or you know the people who were. My question is this: What percentage of these employee claims do you know for sure to be bullshit?

I’ll go first. I owned two restaurants for years, and you can imagine how many claims I saw. Before that, I worked at the local phone company, and before that for a large bank. I’ve had personal knowledge of perhaps twenty employee claims against employers. To the best of my knowledge, 100% of them were bullshit. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression. And impressions matter. (None were sexual harassment cases.)

I’m using the term bullshit instead of “true” because there’s a slight difference. In some cases the employees took advantage of obscure labor laws and found ways to force settlements without ever experiencing any damages.

Now consider the average Republican mindset. We’re talking about a pro-employer group of voters. For many of these voters, Cain’s situation will remind them of all the dishonest employee claims they’ve seen. For many people, especially men, Cain will look like a typical employer getting sued every five minutes by employees looking for cash settlements. Voting for Cain will feel like a vote against fraudulent employee claims, even if that is the opposite of reality. It will FEEL like a referendum against fraudulent claims.

The other factor working in Cain’s favor is his absurd level of confidence and optimism. …

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The president finds another way to insult Israel and Netanyahu. Elliot Abrams has the story.

If Prime Minister Netanyahu were to ask a fair-minded, balanced, sensible adviser what he could realistically do to win the confidence and approbation of President Obama, the answer would have to be “nothing.”

Two examples prove the point.

1. In May, Netanyahu moved the Likud Party considerably to the center in his speech to the opening of the summer session of the Knesset. In that speech he discussed relations with the Palestinians and called for a “long term IDF presence along the Jordan River,” and said “we agree that we must maintain the settlement blocs.” In other words, he was saying that the Israeli presence along the Jordan would be that of soldiers only, not settlers, and that it would in any event not be permanent; and he was saying that only the settlement blocs, not all settlements no matter how small and isolated, would remain with Israel.

The Obama administration’s reaction to these important statements was, well, nothing. Zero. They did not commend them, or even acknowledge that they were important. They were so certain in their view of Netanyahu as a recalcitrant right-winger that they did not even pay attention to what he was saying. …

Alana Goodman has more in Contentions.

There were some legitimate questions about the veracity of this story last night, but Reuters has apparently confirmed it today. At the G-20 summit meeting earlier this month, a technical error reportedly broadcast a private conversation between President Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy to a roomful of reporters – including some undiplomatic carping about Benjamin Netanyahu:

“I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama, unaware that the microphones in their meeting room had been switched on, enabling reporters in a separate location to listen in to a simultaneous translation.

“You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama replied, according to the French interpreter.

Israeli critics of Netanyahu weighed in on the comments in the Jerusalem Post, with Labor MK Daniel Ben-Simon saying that he’s “embarrassed” that Bibi is shown such little respect by allies. But Obama should be the one most embarrassed by this faux pas, which he can expect to be used by Republican presidential candidates to attack his frosty relationship with Israel.

It’s hardly news that Obama and Netanyahu aren’t on friendly terms. But this is one of the more public displays of Obama’s hostility toward the Israeli prime minister, and the latest in a string of diplomatic clashes between the two. Obama’s record provides more than enough evidence that he’s not interested in dealing fairly with Israel, and these comments only add to that. Not only did Obama hand his opponents an easy attack with this, he also came off looking amateurish, unprofessional and catty.

Michael Barone reviews Tuesday’s vote.

The biggest result was Ohio Governor John Kasich’s defeat on Issue 2. Voters cast 61% of their votes (as I write) to repeal Kasich’s law, which had been backed by Republican majorties in the legislature (with some defections). Kasich’s effort is part of a struggle to rein in public employee unions, which use taxpayers’ money (in the form of union dues) to elect pliable politicians who then confer benefits on their members —especially generous health care and pensions—which then result in economy-killing tax rates. It’s a kind of economic death spiral for states and localities where public employee unions are a major political force.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to rein in their powers with a series of ballot propositions in November 2005. The unions spent something like $100 million and defeated him. Unions spent a proportionate amount, more than $30 million it has been reported, in Ohio, a state whose population is about 30% the size of California’s.

There is some consolation here. The same Ohio voters—and the turnout seems to have been just about as high as in November 2010—who voted 61% against Kasich’s public employee union restrictions also voted 66% for Issue 3, which purported to shield Ohioans from any mandate to buy health insurance. This was a clear repudiation of Obamacare, and about half the folks that the unions turned out voted against Obamacare. There were something like 300,000 of them, or almost 10% of the total votes cast, reported as absentee balloters in the big industrial counties (Cuyahoga, Trumbull, Mahoning, Lucas, Montgomery, Franklin, Hamilton) before any other votes were counties.

But the real bragging rights here belong to the public employee unions and the Democrats. …

More from Red State.

Issue 2 in Ohio has failed. Unions poured a gazillion dollars into Ohio and won.  Despite having a sense of this outcome for some time it still stings.  Believe it or not, a great many felt that these reforms were important steps in bring fiscal and structural sanity to government.  The voters clearly did not get that message.

The media is going to try and play this as horse race politics. Governor John Kasich lost and the Democrats won.  And obviously, in some important sense – even if only in the fact the story and perspective being conventional wisdom – this is true. Kasich and Republicans passed this legislation and it has been rejected.  Fair enough.

But I personally believe there is a simpler explanation.  Voters like their local cops, firefighters, nurses and teachers.  In many ways, they idealize these type of positions even if they don’t like the state of education or public safety, etc.  Thus opponents of reform had a very easy and emotionally effective message: Senate Bill 5 is an attack on the “everyday heroes” who protect our communities.  It doesn’t really matter if this was true or not.  In a 30 second ad it is easy to say and makes an emotional connection. This is a huge advantage in a statewide ballot issue.

Combine this with the huge financial advantage the opponents had …

And from Mark Steyn.

Big Labor’s victory over John Kasich’s reforms in Ohio is a reminder to conservatives that we’re still a long way from closing the deal. A majority of the citizenry seem to agree that the nation’s mired and that their homes and jobs and futures are sinking with it. But that same majority is not yet sold on transformative rollbacks of government and the public sector. They seem to think that out there somewhere there’s a way to get the good times back that’s more or less pain-free. More fool them – which is to say Obama & Co will have a pretty good shot at fooling them.

Somewhere in either my current book or the previous one (or possibly both), I cite the line Gerald Ford used to use to ingratiate himself with conservatives: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” That may be true, but there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the problem Mr Papandreou’s ministry has in Athens, and the Kasich administration in Ohio, and many other governments around the western world.

So it’s easy for reformers to get voted in, and easy for their opponents to make sure their reforms get voted down. I’m afraid things are going to get a lot worse before that dynamic shifts.

Joel Kotkin writes on the LA push to fund a stadium.

Over the past decade Los Angeles has steadily declined. It currently has one of the the highest unemployment rates (roughly 12.5%) in the U.S, and there’s little sign of a sustained recovery. The city and county have become a kind of purgatory for all but the most politically connected businesses, while job creation and population growth lag not only the vibrant Texas cities but even aged competitors such as New York.

Rather than address general business conditions, which sorely need fixing, L.A. Mayor Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the other ruling elites have instead focused on revitalizing the city’s urban core, which has done little to boost the region’s overall economy in generations. The most recent example of such foolishness is a $1.5 billion plan to build a football stadium, named Farmers Field, downtown, unanimously approved by the city’s City Council and backed by the city’s “progressive” state delegation.

Like most of  the dominant political class, California Senator and former City Council member  Alex Padilla cites the sad state of the local economy as justification for approving the plan. But, in reality, it’s hard to find something more profoundly irrelevant than a football stadium.

Indeed years of independent investigations have discovered that urban vanity projects like sports teams and convention centers add little to permanent employment or overall regional economic well-being. …

Football stadiums? How about government efforts to promote Christmas Trees. Yuval Levin has the story.

If, like me, you have been terribly worried about the declining status and image of Christmas trees lately, worry not: the Obama administration is on the case! As Heritage notes this morning:

In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board.  The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expand existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)).  And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).

To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52).  And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees.

The administration offered no specific estimate of how many jobs would be created or saved by the Christmas Tree Promotion Board and the new Christmas tree tax, but we can assume the number is very high.

Andrew Malcolm says the tax got scrapped yesterday morning.

… Since the economy is back humming again and unemployment has plummeted, the Obama administration published in the Federal Register Tuesday its intention to charge a new 15 cent tax on cut Christmas trees this year. The Democrats don’t need congressional approval for that baby. The Ag Dept. needn’t wait. Just do it.

So what if eventually some people stop buying American-grown trees and switch to fake ones from China.

But wait! The overnight outrage was quicker than a pajama-clad four-year-old sliding down the stairs on Christmas morning. With the president just off Air Force One from Europe and Pennsylvania and about to head off to Hawaii, the White House was desperate to snuff this guaranteed PR loser.

Scrooge Obama. Tiny Tim Geithner. Ebenezer Biden. The possibilities for fun in this gaffe are endless. …

Michael Graham has a good thought. Maybe not all people should go to college.

… “We should be doing everything we can to put a college education within reach for every American,” President Barack Obama told a group of college students in Denver last week. “College isn’t just one of the best investments you can make in your future. It’s one of the best investments America can make in our future.”

Before we beat this nonsensical notion to death with the latest data, take a second and think about the young people you know. The kid behind the fast-food counter, the geek camped out at Best Buy waiting for the Call of Duty game, the girl popping her gum at the hair salon.

Would it really be the “best investment in America” to spend $100,000 of our money sending each one of them to college?

Because that’s what we’re talking about: your money. Every year Massachusetts taxpayers pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the University of Massachusetts system, subsidizing college costs for all. Add the $36 billion in federal Pell Grants and that giant sucking sound is the money going from your wallet to some kid’s six-year bong party known as “the college experience.”

And what’s the big payoff? Some entitled punk waving a “Debt Is Slavery!” sign outside a shabby tent on Dewey Square. This is America’s “best investment?” …