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Fred and Kimberley Kagan are not fans of the Iraq withdrawal.

Today, President Obama declared the successful completion of his strategy to remove all American military forces from Iraq by the end of the year. He said: “[E]nsuring the success of this strategy has been one of my highest national security priorities” since taking office. “Over the next two months, our troops in Iraq, tens of thousands of them, will pack up their gear and board convoys for the journey home. The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops. That is how America’s military effort in Iraq will end.” In other words, our efforts in Iraq end neither in victory nor defeat, success nor failure, but simply in retreat.

The humiliation of this retreat is compounded by the dishonesty of its presentation. Today, President Obama claimed that the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq was the centerpiece of the strategy he has been pursuing there since taking office. But that was not the sole or even primary objective of the strategy he announced five weeks after becoming president. At Camp Lejeune in February 2009, to an audience of Marines, he declared: …

Dittos from Jennifer Rubin.

It is hard to know which is worse: the irresponsibility of a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces in Iraq or the sheer dishonesty with which it was presented. For now I will focus on the latter.

Josh Rogin explains that the president simply lied when he explained that the withdrawal was the successful culmination of his Iraq policy. In fact it was borne of necessity as a result of the administration’s inept negotiations:

The Obama administration is claiming it always intended to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year, in line with the president’s announcement today, but in fact several parts of the administration appeared to try hard to negotiate a deal for thousands of troops to remain — and failed. . . . …

According to Ed Morrissey it looks like the NY Times takes a dim view also.

When Barack Obama announced yesterday that all US troops would return from Iraq, he framed it as a campaign promise kept, although Obama promised to pull the troops out in 16 months and ended up sticking with the timeline set by George Bush instead.  He also neglected to mention that his administration had spent the last several months trying to avoid the outcome he proudly proclaimed.  This morning, the New York Times makes clear that neither side wanted a full withdrawal from Iraq, and that the collapse in negotiations came as a result of bungling by the White House:

“President Obama’s announcement on Friday that all American troops would leave Iraq by the end of the year was an occasion for celebration for many, but some top American military officials were dismayed by the announcement, seeing it as the president’s putting the best face on a breakdown in tortured negotiations with the Iraqis.

And for the negotiators who labored all year to avoid that outcome, it represented the triumph of politics over the reality of Iraq’s fragile security’s requiring some troops to stay, a fact everyone had assumed would prevail … ”

The European debt crisis is getting worse according to James Pethokoukis.

Do you think this month’s stock market rebound means Americans can stop worrying about the EU debt crisis? (One big bank estimates a full-on financial crisis over there could send U.S. unemployment to 12 percent.)

If so, I have some terrible news for you. AEI’s Desmond Lachman makes the case that the terrifying case that Euro Crisis is actually intensifying:

1. The Greek economy now appears to be in virtual freefall as indicated by a 12 percent contraction in real GDP over the past two years and an increase in the unemployment rate to over 15 percent. This makes a substantial write down of Greece’s US$450 billion sovereign debt highly probable within the next few months. Such a default would constitute the largest sovereign debt default on record.

2. Contagion from the Greek debt crisis is affecting not simply the smaller economies of Ireland and Portugal, which too have solvency problems. It is now also impacting Italy and Spain, Europe’s third and fourth largest economies, respectively. This poses a real threat to the Euro’s survival in its present form. …

Interesting piece in Forbes on the red state in your future.

Voters around the country are concluding it’s better to be red than dead—applying a whole meaning to an old phrase.  If you do not currently live in a red state, there’s a good chance you will be in the near future.  Either you will flee to a red state or a red state will come to you—because voters fed up with blue-state fiscal irresponsibility will elect candidates who promise to pass red-state policies.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), 25 state legislatures are controlled by Republicans and 16 by Democrats, with eight split (i.e., each party controlling one house).  There are 29 Republican governors and 20 Democrats, with one independent.  And there are 20 states where Republicans control both the legislature and governor’s mansion vs. 11 Democratic, with 18 split (one party controls the governor’s office and the other the legislature).

And though we are a year away from the 2012 election, generic Republican vs. Democratic polls have given Republicans the edge for more than a year.  If that pattern holds—and if blue-state leaders refuse to learn from their policy mistakes, just like their true-blue leader in the White House—it likely means there will be even more red states in 2013. …

According to Legal Insurrection blog, Rhode Island may be the first state to tank. Follow the links to the NY Times article.

You know about the RI pension mess, because I’ve been pounding that issue pretty much since the founding of this blog three years ago.

The New York Times takes a devastating look at Rhode Island, The Little State With a Big Mess (h/t @amandacarpenter):

ON the night of Sept. 8, Gina M. Raimondo, a financier by trade, rolled up here with news no one wanted to hear: Rhode Island, she declared, was going broke.

Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow. But if current trends held, Ms. Raimondo warned, the Ocean State would soon look like Athens on the Narragansett: undersized and overextended. Its economy would wither. Jobs would vanish. The state would be hollowed out.

It is not the sort of message you might expect from Ms. Raimondo, a proud daughter of Providence, a successful venture capitalist and, not least, the current general treasurer of Rhode Island. But it is a message worth hearing. The smallest state in the union, it turns out, has a very big debt problem.

After decades of drift, denial and inaction, Rhode Island’s $14.8 billion pension system is in crisis. Ten cents of every state tax dollar now goes to retired public workers. Before long, Ms. Raimondo has been cautioning in whistle-stops here and across the state, that figure will climb perilously toward 20 cents….

In some ways, the central question is not only what the government owes to pensioners but what citizens owe to one another.

That last sentence hits the nail on the head.  In Rhode Island, the citizenry is being asked to spend increasing percentages of its income and assets not for the general welfare, but for the welfare of a relatively small percentage of the population who have state and municipal pensions.

It’s often joked that General Motors is a pension plan which makes automobiles.  Rhode Island is in worse shape.  Rhode Island is becoming a public sector pension plan which doesn’t make anything.

CNBC says state debt may top $4 trillion.

The total of U.S. state debt, including pension liabilities, could surpass $4 trillion, with California owing the most and Vermont owing the least, a new analysis says.

The nonprofit State Budget Solutions combined states’ major debt and future liabilities, primarily for pensions and employee healthcare, unemployment insurance loans, outstanding bonds and projected fiscal 2011 budget gaps. It found that in total, states are in debt for $4.2 trillion.

The group, which follows state fiscal conditions and advocates for limited spending and taxes, said the deficit calculations that states make “do not offer a full picture of the states’ liabilities and can rely on budget gimmicks and accounting games to hide the extent of the deficit.”

The housing bust, financial crisis and economic recession caused states’ tax revenue to plunge, and huge holes have emerged in their budgets over the last few years. Because all states except Vermont must end their fiscal years with balanced budgets, states have scrambled to cut spending, hike taxes, borrow and turn to the federal government for help.

Taxpayers are worried the states’ poor fiscal health will persist for a long time and some Republicans in Congress have questioned whether the situation is worse than the states say. …

The Chicago Tribune has an example of how states got in this mess.

Two lobbyists with no prior teaching experience were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found.

Steven Preckwinkle, the political director for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and fellow union lobbyist David Piccioli were the only people who took advantage of a small window opened by lawmakers a few months earlier.

The legislation enabled union officials to get into the state teachers pension fund and count their previous years as union employees after quickly obtaining teaching certificates and working in a classroom. They just had to do it before the bill was signed into law.

Preckwinkle’s one day of subbing qualified him to become a participant in the state teachers pension fund, allowing him to pick up 16 years of previous union work and nearly five more years since he joined. He’s 59, and at age 60 he’ll be eligible for a state pension based on the four-highest consecutive years of his last 10 years of work.

His paycheck fluctuates as a union lobbyist, but pension records show his earnings in the last school year were at least $245,000. Based on his salary history so far, he could earn a pension of about $108,000 a year, more than double what the average teacher receives.

His pay for one day as a substitute was $93, according to records of the Illinois Teachers Retirement System. …

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Joe Nocera, in the NY Times, of all places, says the Bork nomination fight was the beginning of ugly in politics.

On Oct. 23, 1987 — 24 years ago on Sunday — Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was voted down by the Senate. All but two Democrats voted “nay.”

The rejection of a Supreme Court nominee is unusual but not unheard of (see Clement Haynsworth Jr.). But rarely has a failed nominee had the pedigree — and intellectual firepower — of Bork. He had been a law professor at Yale, the solicitor general of the United States and, at the time Ronald Reagan tapped him for the court, a federal appeals court judge.

Moreover, Bork was a legal intellectual, a proponent of original intent and judicial restraint. The task of the judge, he once wrote, is “to discern how the framers’ values, defined in the context of the world they knew, apply to the world we know.” He said that Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, was a “wholly unjustifiable judicial usurpation” of authority that belonged to the states, that the court’s recent rulings on affirmative action were problematic and that the First Amendment didn’t apply to pornography.

Whatever you think of these views, they cannot be fairly characterized as extreme; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among many others, has questioned the rationale offered by the court to justify Roe v. Wade. Nor was Bork himself an extremist. He was a strongly opinionated, somewhat pugnacious, deeply conservative judge. (At 84 today, he hasn’t mellowed much either, to judge from an interview he recently gave Newsweek.)

I bring up Bork not only because Sunday is a convenient anniversary. His nomination battle is also a reminder that our poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be — and have been — every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.

I’ll take it one step further. The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics. …

Hot Air post on Jindal’s big win on Saturday.

Say, did you hear about the big election yesterday? Well, if you’re like the majority of the country, you probably weren’t even aware anyone was voting on Saturday. But for the politically addicted, you might have known that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was up for another term. So… how did that work out for him? Not too shabby. …

Writing in the Las Vegas paper, Sherman Frederick says Harry Reid is nuts.

Harry Reid is showing up the Occupy Wall Street protesters. He takes crazy talk to a whole new level.

Last week, the bard of Searchlight stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate. In front of C-SPAN and everybody, he said — and I’m not making this up — “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs are doing just fine. It’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers.”

And all the good people of Nevada, along with all the wild horses, cattle, ground squirrels and sheep, lifted their heads and said: “Is Harry Reid out of his ever-loving mind?”

Nevada’s economy has been missing for so long it’s pictured on the side of milk cartons. And free-spending, deficit-hiking Harry Reid is listed as the No. 1 suspect.

When Harry tells the nation to “go left” economically, Nevadans instinctively lean to the right.

If being wrong were an art, Harry Reid’s work would be on display at the Louvre. …

The great thinkers or Washington have dealt us another mess; this time student loans. NY Post has the story.

Three years after the housing-market meltdown, a college education may be the next part of the American Dream to turn into a nightmare.

For the first time, Americans owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit-card bills, with a tally that could soon top $1 trillion — leaving millions of Americans with a crushing debt burden at a time when decent-paying jobs are scarce.

“I’ve paid on my student loans, but I owe just as much as when I started,” says Laura Pounders, 56, who went back to college 16 years ago in hopes of securing a higher-paying job than the two she had.

“It makes me cringe when I hear politicians say we need people to go to college. Why? So you can accrue $50,000 in debt and get a job that pays $8 an hour? I’m going to die with this debt.”

John Smith, 31, of Brooklyn, works part time at a Trader Joe’s because he hasn’t found work in his field for over a year, despite having a master’s degree. He has about $45,000 in student loan debt. His girlfriend, Meropi Peponides, 27, a graduate student at Columbia University, will have over $50,000 by the time she graduates. …

Patrick Michaels writes about the green energy crack-up.

History — of the U.S., Europe, the U.K. and its former dominions — repeatedly shows that environmental protection is a luxury good.  When per-capita income reaches some threshold, the citizenry tire of opaque air and sleazy waters,  various agencies and permanent bureaucracies sprout, and, as long as times are good, regulation is good.

Our friends in the U.K. and Europe are especially green.  Just hop off the plane in London and pick up the papers.  Global warming is everywhere, and, for decades, the religion’s been that carbon dioxide reductions are fine, virtuous, and they’re going to make everyone rich. I have a social security system I would like to sell them.

This all splatters to a halt when economies go south.  And the crash can be especially jarring if greenness is one of the causes.  Thanks in no small part to the debacle in Europe, in a very few recent weeks, we have witnessed the great green crack-up.

Admittedly, the first glimmers showed up a couple of years ago in Spain, which suffered the malady of economic miasma brought on by environmental populism. …  

Because he is such a good writer, and because the embarrassing quotes from Jackie were so off-the-wall, we have Andrew Ferguson’s take on the latest from the Kennedy BS machine.

Is there a more empathetic person in the world than Diane Sawyer, the top newsreader at ABC TV? I’m sure there must be—around seven billion of them, probably. But is there anyone who looks more empathetic than Diane Sawyer? Not a chance. When she peers at you through the camera she has the look of someone who’s just seen your lab results and is trying to figure out how to break the bad news. It must be terribly unnerving to see it close up, firsthand, in person—especially while she’s sitting next to you on a couch, no less.

I give Caroline Kennedy a lot of credit for retaining her composure with those two moist peepers trained in on her. This was during a long interview conducted for a two-hour TV special that ABC aired September 13 called Jacqueline Kennedy: In Her Own Words. (Diane Sawyer told us the proper pronunciation of Mrs. Kennedy’s first name is “Zsock-leen,” though everybody called her Jackie, which must have made life less embarrassing.) The special was the trumpet blast alerting the nation to the publication of another product of the Kennedy apparat, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. The book consists of previously unheard interviews Mrs. Kennedy gave Arthur Schlesinger in early 1964—eight CDs’ worth. 

Every time you think that the Kennedy apparat is dead, there’s some new burst of publicity that makes you realize it’s st …ill humming, or at least wheezing. These guys know how to move units. Here in the twenty-first century, in keeping with contemporary “best practices,” a good deal of the work previously done by Kennedy toadies—court historians, speechwriters, bagmen, PR wizards—has been outsourced, and ABC is one of the chief contractors. For 36 hours the network became the Zsock-leen Channel, from Good Morning America to Nightline, and a week later, Historic Conversations was the bestselling book in the country.

The apparat continues work begun by the patriarch, Joe Kennedy, in the 1930s. One of his first moves was to hire Hollywood cinematographers to record the everyday doings (staged) of his toothy and, in a few cases, toothsome children, in Technicolor, on 35mm film. The scenes were then inventoried and cross-tabulated by activity and Kennedy kid—Touch Football w/Eunice, Part xxxvii; Touch Football w/Eunice, Part xxxviii—and stored in a flameproof warehouse in the Bronx. It was destroyed by fire, and the film canisters went up with it. That damn Kennedy curse. 

The photographers kept at it, needless to say, and the stills and movies produced over the course of half a century are essential to the Kennedy mystique.

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Mark Steyn reacts to the administration’s endless need to spend money we don’t have.

… It’s just about possible to foresee, say, Iceland or Ireland getting its spending under control. But, when a nation of 300 million people presumes to determine grade-school hiring and almost everything else through an ever more centralized bureaucracy, you’re setting yourself up for waste on a scale unknown to history. For example, under the Obama “stimulus,” U.S. taxpayers gave a $529 million loan guarantee to the company Fisker to build their Karma electric car. At a factory in Finland.

If you’re wondering how giving half-a-billion dollars to a Finnish factory stimulates the U.S. economy, well, what’s a lousy half-bil in a multitrillion-dollar sinkhole? Besides, in the 2009 global rankings, Finnish schoolkids placed sixth in math, third in reading and second in science, while suffering under the burden of a per-student budget half that of York City. By comparison, America placed 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in math. So the good news is that, by using U.S. government money to fund a factory in Finland, Fisker may be able to hire workers smart enough to figure out how to build an unwanted electric car that doesn’t lose its entire U.S. taxpayer investment.

In a sane world, Joe Biden’s remarks would be greeted by derisive laughter, even by fourth-graders. Certainly by Finnish fourth-graders.

Peter Ferrara in Forbes notes how the people are being ignored. 

In 2010, the American people delivered a stinging rebuke to President Obama.  The 63 seat Republican gain in the House was a New Deal size landslide, harking back to a time when America was choosing a fundamental change of course.  In the Senate, Republicans came back from a minority unable to even mount a filibuster to within three seats of the Democrats, after some party infighting fumbled away a couple of quite possible wins.

For Democrats, that does not bode well for a 2012 election with 23 Democrat Senate seats at stake, and a filibuster proof Republican majority possible by winning only half of those.  The people elected these Republicans in 2010 to stop the emergent Obama agenda, not to cooperate in its advancement.

But President Barack Obama refused to heed the people and change course.  The election results only changed the means by which he has pursued the most left wing policies of any President in U.S. history.  Recognizing that he could no longer advance his agenda through Congress, Obama pivoted to maximizing the vast regulatory powers of the Executive Branch.

For example, since cap and trade legislation obviously no longer had any prayer of getting through Congress (even the overwhelmingly Democrat Congress of 2009-2010 wouldn’t pass it), Obama said after the election, “Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way.  It was a means, not an end.”  Sometimes this pivot has involved ignoring legal rulings, breaking agreements with Congress, and exceeding statutory authority. …

National Journal reports on a retiring Dem slamming the administration.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., announced his retirement from Congress this afternoon — and he issued a scathing parting shot at President Obama’s track record on his way out.

In a statement explaining his decision, Cardoza, a leader of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, said he was “dismayed” by the administration’s “failure to understand and effectively address the current housing foreclosure crisis.”

“Home foreclosures are destroying communities and crushing our economy, and the Administration’s inaction is infuriating,” Cardoza said.

A former chairman of the moderate Blue Dog Caucus, Cardoza also bemoaned the increasing partisanship in Washington, and blamed the media for fueling the ideological divide in the country, not giving enough attention to moderates. …

Alana Goodman posts on Obama’s Carter-like poll numbers.

Obama is getting down to the wire. There is a strong historical correlation between where a president’s approval ratings are around this point in his presidency, and whether he goes on to win a second term. And yet there’s no indication that Obama’s approval ratings are improving. In fact, Gallup finds that his 11th quarter numbers are the worst of Obama’s presidency–as well as the worst of any recent president except Jimmy Carter?:

“Only one elected president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, had a lower 11th quarter average than Obama. Carter averaged 31% during his 11th quarter, which was marked by a poor economy and high energy prices. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were the only other post-World War II presidents whose job approval averages were below 50% in their 11th quarter in office.”

According to Gallup’s analysis, “an incumbent president’s 12th- and 13th-quarter averages give a strong indication of whether he will win a second term.” So the crucial test is whether Obama can perk up his approval ratings between now and January. …

Peter Wehner wants to know when the anti-Semitism of the Occupy group will be criticized by the president.

During one of the GOP presidential debates, two or three people in an audience of more than 5,000 booed a question posed by a gay soldier, not the gay soldier himself. As one might expect, though, many journalists, as well as the president, decided to make a big deal of this. It was held up as an example of Republican bigotry. President Civility, Barack Obama, decided to put his own interpretation on things:

‘ “We  don’t believe in the kind of smallness that says it’s OK for a stage full of political leaders — one of whom could end up being the president of the United States — being silent when an American soldier is booed,” Obama said at a Human Rights Campaign dinner. ‘

To repeat: the soldier was not booed; his question was. But no matter; Obama had political points to score and a base to energize. Yet with the precedent Obama is setting in place, I do wonder: The Occupy Wall Street movement is rife with anti-Semitism. The statements we’re hearing from the protesters are vile, ugly and seemingly endless. And yet this is a movement Obama, Vice President Biden, Minority Leader Pelosi, and DNC chairwoman Wasserman Schultz have all warmly embraced. Revealingly, they have yet to denounce the unvarnished anti-Semitism they must be aware of by now. ‘

I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe in the kind of smallness that says it’s OK for a president and Democratic leaders – including one who could end up being re-elected as president of the United States – being silent when a movement they have praised and are provoking is spewing forth anti-Semitic bile on a daily basis. It would be nice, and exceedingly rare, for the president to show even a spark of moral leadership.

If he’s not careful, one might begin to (reasonably) conclude the president isn’t terribly bothered by anti-Semitism. Because if he were, he would actually speak out against it. Even once.

Investor’s.com editors want the GOP contenders to pin the mortgage mess on the government.

If Republicans are to take back the White House and Senate, they need to do a better job tying Democrats and Washington to the subprime crisis. It’s not hard, yet even their front-runner struggles to make the case.

On Wednesday night, CNN host Piers Morgan guilted Cain into allowing that banks were, as Morgan put it, “effectively preying on the most vulnerable elements of American society,” and that Wall Street deserves at least partial blame for the crisis and should be held to account. “I wouldn’t defend the banks,” Cain said, “because I happen to think that the banks are part of the problem. Wall Street is.”

Cain belatedly also faulted Fannie and Freddie, and the Democrats in Washington who protected them. Piers then pressed him to come up with a pie chart alloting blame — Washington vs. Wall Street—and Cain assigned neither a majority responsibility for the mess.

But based on the number of toxic loans in the system in 2008, the government was responsible for not just a simple majority, but more than two-thirds. It’s quantifiable — 71% to be exact (see chart). And the remaining 29% of private-label junk was mostly attributable to Countrywide Financial, which was under the heel of HUD and its “fair-lending” edicts. …

New York Magazine reports on the Occupy folks turning towards Animal Farm. Next will they turn towards Lord of the Flies?

All occupiers are equal — but some occupiers are more equal than others. In wind-whipped Zuccotti Park, new divisions and hierarchies are threatening to upend Occupy Wall Street and its leaderless collective.

As the protest has grown, some of the occupiers have spontaneously taken charge on projects large and small. But many of the people in Zuccotti Park aren’t taking direction well, leading to a tense Thursday of political disagreements, the occasional shouting match, and at least one fistfight.

It began, as it so often does, with a drum circle. The ten-hour groove marathons weren’t sitting well with the neighborhood’s community board, the ironically situated High School of Economics and Finance that sits on the corner of Zuccotti Park, or many of the sleep-deprived protesters.

“[The high school] couldn’t teach,” explained Josh Nelson, a 27-year-old occupier from Nebraska. “And we’ve had issues with the drummers too. They drum incessantly all day, and really loud.” Facilitators spearheaded a General Assembly proposal to limit the drumming to two hours a day. “The drumming is a major issue which has the potential to get us kicked out,” said Lauren Digion, a leader on the sanitation working group.

But the drums were fun. They brought in publicity and money. Many non-facilitators were infuriated by the decision and claimed that it had been forced through the General Assembly.

“They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music,” said Seth Harper, an 18-year-old from Georgia. “The GA decided to do it … they suppressed people’s opinions. I wanted to do introduce a different proposal, but a big black organizer chick with an Afro said I couldn’t.” …

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Streetwise Professor says if Occupy Wall Street wants to do some good they might consider occupying Fannie and Freddie.

It is passing strange–or maybe not–that the OWS crowd/mob is giving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a pass.  They are the best example of an unseemly nexus between government and business.  Look at the guys who were their CEOs and board members over the years.  Democratic Party stalwart–and Obama BFF–James Johnson, who walked away with a cool $200 mil.  Former Clinton appointees Jamie Gorelick and Franklin Raines.  Bill Daley.  All of whom did very, very well feeding at the GSE teat.

Us?  Not so much.  For those of you keeping score at home, the tab for F&F is now $169 billion.  And the meter is still running: current estimates are for an additional $51 billion in losses over the next 10 years.  That’s $220 billion for you OWS types who majored in sociology. …

Charles Krauthammer comments on the latest debate.

On Tuesday night, seismologists at the Las Vegas Oceanographic Institute reported the first recorded movement of a hair on Mitt Romney’s head. Although it was only one follicle, displaced a mere 1.2 centimeters, the tremors were felt from Iowa to New Hampshire. Simultaneously, these same scientists detected signs of life in Rick Perry, last seen comatose at the recent Dartmouth debate.

Such were the highlights of Tuesday’s seven-person Republican brawl at the Venetian. To be sure, there were other developments: Herman Cain stumbled, Newt Gingrich grinned, Rick Santorum landed a clean shot at Romneycare and Michele Bachmann made a spirited bid for a comeback.

But the main event was the scripted Perry attack on Romney, reprising the old charge of Romney hiring illegal immigrants. Perry’s face-to-face accusation of rank hypocrisy had the intended effect. From the ensuing melee emerged a singularity: a ruffled Romney, face flushed, voice raised. …

McCain campaign aide on why he hated the debates and why they’re useful. 

When the 2008 presidential election ended in defeat for my candidate, John McCain, I was consoled by the knowledge I would never again have to be involved in a candidate debate. I hated them.

For seemingly endless stretches, it felt like the chief activities of our campaign were helping our candidate prepare for debates, pacing anxiously in holding rooms while he slugged it out on stage with his opponents, and arguing about the results after they were over. Why, I often wondered, had we ever agreed to do so many of the damn things?

The biggest winners of those contrived contests were the sponsoring cable news networks that showcased themselves and boosted their ratings at the expense of the miserable candidates and their staff.

Debates have become the most important function of the campaigns for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, and my sympathies go out to all the candidates and their teams. …

USA Today OpEd thinks Romney is in the lead.

Mitt Romney is the equivalent of the Republicans’ backup prom date, the standby if no better offer comes along.

Will the candidate who has always been near the head of the pack but never run away with the nomination, a man who is not always in step with an anxious and anti-establishment GOP base, get into the big dance with President Obama because Romney is perceived as the Republican most able to beat Obama in 2012?

Republican primary voters “are in a rebellious mood and Mitt Romney is not a rebellious candidate,” said the Pew Research Center’s Andrew Kohut.

Yet a CNN poll Oct. 14-16 said 41% of Republicans believed that Romney had the best chance of beating Obama next year. Herman Cain was a distant second at 24%. And 51% said they expected Romney to be their party’s 2012 nominee.

WSJ OpEd by John Yoo celebrates 20 years of Justice Thomas. 

This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court. In his first two decades on the bench, Justice Thomas has established himself as the original Constitution’s greatest defender against elite efforts at social engineering. His stances for limited government and individual freedom make him the left’s lightning rod and the tea party’s intellectual godfather. And he is only halfway through the 40 years he may sit on the high court.

Justice Thomas’s two decades on the bench show the simple power of ideas over the pettiness of our politics. Media and academic elites have spent the last 20 years trying to marginalize him by drawing a portrait of a man stung by his confirmation, angry at his rejection by the civil rights community, and a blind follower of fellow conservatives. But Justice Thomas has broken through this partisan fog to convince the court to adopt many of his positions, and to become a beacon to the grass-roots movement to restrain government spending and reduce the size of the welfare state.

Clarence Thomas set the table for the tea party by making originalism fashionable again. Many appointees to the court enjoy its role as arbiter of society’s most divisive questions—race, abortion, religion, gay rights and national security—and show little desire to control their own power. Antonin Scalia, at best, thinks interpreting the Constitution based on its original meaning is “the lesser evil,” as he wrote in a 1989 law journal article, because it prevents judges from pursuing their own personal policies. Justice Thomas, however, thinks that the meaning of the Constitution held at its ratification binds the United States as a political community, and that decades of precedent must be scraped off the original Constitution like barnacles on a ship’s hull. …

Huffington Post mines the book on Steve Jobs.

Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the president personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that Obama “was really psyched to meet with you,” Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.

Jobs also criticized America’s education system, saying it was “crippled by union work rules,” noted Isaacson. “Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.” Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.

The Economist reviews a documentary on the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. The conclusions seem to be scattered, but we like the piece because it reminds us how foolish the bien pensants really are.

THE filmmakers behind “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” confronted a formidable task: to strip away the layers of a narrative so familiar that even they themselves believed it when they first set out to make their documentary. Erected in St Louis, Missouri, in the early 1950s, at a time of postwar prosperity and optimism, the massive Pruitt-Igoe housing project soon became a notorious symbol of failed public policy and architectural hubris, its 33 towers razed a mere two decades later. Such symbolism found its most immediate expression in the iconic image of an imploding building, the first of Pruitt-Igoe’s towers to be demolished in 1972 (it was featured in the cult film Koyaanisqatsi, with Philip Glass’s score murmuring in the background). The spectacle was as powerful politically as it was visually, locating the failure of Pruitt-Igoe within the buildings themselves—in their design and in their mission.
 
The scale of the project made it conspicuous from the get-go: 33 buildings, 11-storeys each, arranged across a sprawling, 57 acres in the poor DeSoto-Carr neighbourhood on the north side of St Louis. The complex was supposed to put the modernist ideals of Le Corbusier into action; at the time, Architectural Forum ran a story praising the plan to replace “ramshackle houses jammed with people—and rats” in the city’s downtown with “vertical neighbourhoods for poor people.” The main architect was Minoru Yamasaki, who would go on to design another monument to modernism that would also be destroyed, but for very different reasons, and under very different circumstances: his World Trade Centre went up in the early 1970s, right around the time that Pruitt-Igoe was pulled down. …

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Mark Steyn notes some of the farce in Occupy Wall Street.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Ben & Jerry’s, the hippie-dippy Vermont ice-cream makers, have come out in favor of “Occupy Wall Street.” Or as their press release puts it:

“We, the Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors, compelled by our personal convictions and our Company’s mission and values, wish to express our deepest admiration to all of you who have initiated the non-violent Occupy Wall Street Movement and to those around the country who have joined in solidarity.”

Ben & Jerry’s is a wholly owned subsidiary of Unilever. What’s that? It’s an Anglo-Dutch multinational (stand well back) corporation!! They produce a big chunk of everything in your kitchen and bathroom. Twelve of their brands have annual sales of over a billion euros per product, and, as I’m sure I don’t need to point out, a euro is well north of a buck these days. Unilever’s various billion-euro brands include Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Sunsilk shampoo, and Flora margarine. They’re the biggest ice-cream manufacturer not just in Vermont but on the planet: They have a zillion factories churning out Popsicle and Breyers and brands you’ve never heard of but which are the biggest-selling cones and sundaes in Singapore, Pakistan, Belgium, and Lithuania. Unilever is about as corporately corporate as you can get.

They brought in a Unilever guy from Norway to be Ben & Jerry’s CEO, and neither Ben nor Jerry holds an executive position with the company, any more than Uncle Ben (no relation) and Aunt Jemima do with their respective corporate masters. I suppose they could have renamed the operating unit UniBen or JerryLever, but instead they decided to keep the whole tie-dye peace-pop cherry-Garcia vibe going. One might think this inherently preposterous, in the same way that one would assume even gullible music fans would guffaw at a label called “Maverick Records” that is, in fact, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group. …

Dem pollster, Douglas Schoen is aghast at the administration’s decision to throw in with the flea party. 

President Obama and the Democratic leadership are making a critical error in embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement—and it may cost them the 2012 election.

Last week, senior White House adviser David Plouffe said that “the protests you’re seeing are the same conversations people are having in living rooms and kitchens all across America. . . . People are frustrated by an economy that does not reward hard work and responsibility, where Wall Street and Main Street don’t seem to play by the same set of rules.” Nancy Pelosi and others have echoed the message.

Yet the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people—and particularly with swing voters who are largely independent and have been trending away from the president since the debate over health-care reform.

The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion. …

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor tosses out some ideas on why Obama would want to align with OWS. 

So what explains Obama’s decision to align himself with such a cretinous assemblage?  I can think of several, not mutually exclusive, alternatives:

1. Given the objective economic conditions, Obama feels desperate politically, and knows that he cannot win using a conventional campaign.  So he is throwing in with a disruptive force that could upset conventional political dynamics and calculations.  A go-for-broke, put himself at the head of the mob strategy.  These strategies can work, but they are very risky–and often end up devouring the would-be leaders–for once destablizing forces are unleashed, they are extremely difficult to control. [Update: I note that the pivotal moment in Obama's 2008 victory was the Lehman collapse and subsequent panic. He was fading before that, but the crisis propelled him to victory.   He benefited from chaos in 2008: why not create his own in 2011-2012?]

2. A realization that the ultimate result of a success of this movement would be to strengthen the government’s power–and not coincidentally strengthen the corporatism from which the Daleys etc. profit.

3. A recognition that this is a way to shakedown Wall Street for campaign contributions which have been less forthcoming than in 2008.  Remember Obama’s “my administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks” remark in 2009?   Translated: pay up or I’ll get out of the way.

2012 was already shaping up to be an ugly and angry campaign.  By going all in for a class warfare, us against them, strategy, Obama is making it all the uglier.  One interpretation is that he is choosing the Sampson option:  If I go down, I’ll bring everything down with me.

Mickey Kaus thinks maybe the president is over the top with his rhetoric.

Obama has been accused of feeling smugly superior to the conventional pols around him, especially those in Congress. He has now responded with this jobs-bill pitch:

“We’re going to give members of Congress another chance to step up to the plate and do the right thing,” Mr. Obama said as he began a three-day bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia. “Maybe they just couldn’t understand the whole thing all at once, so we’re going to break it up into bite-sized pieces so they can take a thoughtful approach to this legislation.” [Emphasis.Added.]

That should put the “condescension” charge to rest. …

Jonah Goldberg says don’t lose sight of the fact these people are leftists.

.. Meanwhile, I think it’s important not to lose sight of the political import of Occupy Wall Street. Even if this was a campground for modern day Horatio Algers—which I do not believe—the OWS movement is lending its voice to institutions and personalities who are fundamentally opposed to capitalism. One needn’t call the full roll of speakers at Zuccotti Park and its sister protests to know that I am right. But when Francis Fox Piven, the American Communist Party, Slavoj Zizek, et al are being greeted with cheers or at least open arms or when surveys of actual protesters show that a third advocate violence to advance their cause, I for one do not find much solace in the fact that they’ve done yeoman work creating a water filtration system.

Speaking of leftists who can’t give it up, Justice Stevens gets a once over from Richard Epstein.

… What is so sad about Justice Stevens’ recent extrajudicial outbursts is that they go in exactly the opposite direction, by lashing out at decisions that he does not like, without worrying much whether or how they fit in with the original constitutional scheme.

The first example in this regard is his statement that he regarded the position of the Bush team in Bush v. Gore as “frivolous.” According to Politico [4],

Stevens recalls that he bumped into fellow Justice Stephen Breyer at a Christmas party, where the two men discussed the issue.

“We agreed that the application was frivolous,” Stevens writes. “To secure a stay, a litigant must show that one is necessary to prevent a legally cognizable irreparable injury. Bush’s attorneys had failed to make any such showing.”

“Frivolous” is a fighting word. But just what was Justice Stevens thinking? Clearly the statement is a cheap shot at those who took the opposite side in Bush v. Gore. As a matter of decorum, it seems wrong to invoke Justice Breyer’s name while he is still sitting on the Court, and wrong as well to take potshots at those like Justices Scalia and Thomas, who are also on the Supreme Court, or Chief Justice Rehnquist, who is dead. Put otherwise, all sitting justices are subject to all sorts of institutional constraints that make it inappropriate for them to respond to Justice Stevens. Knowing that, it seems wise for him to leave the harsh words to others.

On substantive matters, the picture is no better. The last thing that should be said about the decision in Bush v. Gore is that there is “no legally cognizable irreparable injury” when the presidency of the United States is at stake. To be sure, one could take the position that the recount should be allowed to go forward before its legality is decided. But what would have happened if a highly disputed recount had gone forward only for a divided court to decide that the recount should never have been allowed at all? Indeed, if Justice Stevens’ Christmas party observation was that obvious, it is passing strange that no one bothered to raise it in Bush v. Gore to begin with.

Worse still is the dismissive attitude that Justice Stevens takes toward those who disagree with him. I quite agree that the equal protection argument adopted by the five-member majority in Bush v. Gore was, to say the least, something of a stretch. But I have long believed that the three-justice opinion signed by Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Justices Scalia and Thomas, carried a lot of weight. The Florida Supreme Court had made a complete mess of the recount provisions of contested elections in a political effort to remove the control of that decision from Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, in whom the power had been vested under state law.

To my mind, the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court applied bore no relationship to the one that the Florida legislature had enacted to govern election disputes. Under those circumstances, it was more than credible to argue the opposite position that the Florida recount was unconstitutional because it did not meet the requirement of Article I, Section 1 that “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature may direct, a Number of Electors” who then cast votes for president. The sad point here is that Justice Stevens simply bypasses the arguments that cut against his position. …

Andrew Malcolm has some good news and some bad news. Good news is he has late-night humor wrap up. Bad news is they found Obama’s teleprompter.

First, the bad news: They recovered President Obama’s teleprompter.

So, anybody going to his speeches on the current Darth Vader armored bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia is still going to get the full 22-minute monty about how he’s there to listen.

The Real Good Talker’s top speech aide was in a truck stolen from a Richmond hotel parking lot early Monday morning and recovered in another hotel parking lot about 12 hours later. …

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How ignorant is Rep Barbara Lee? This open letter from Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek will give you an idea.

… Fred Barnes reports in the Weekly Standard that you refuse to use computerized checkout lanes at supermarkets (“Boneheaded Economics,” Oct. 24).  As you – who are described on your website as “progressive” – explain, “I refuse to do that.  I know that’s a job or two or three that’s gone.”

Overlooking the fact that you overlook the lower prices on groceries made possible by this labor-saving technology, I’ve some questions for you:

Do you also avoid using computerized (“automatic”) elevators, riding only in those few that still use manual elevator operators?

Do you steer clear of newer automobiles equipped with technologies that enable them to go for 100,000 miles before needing a tune-up?  I’m sure I can find for you, say, a 1972 Chevy Vega that will oblige you to employ countless mechanics.

Do you shun tubeless steel-belted radial tires on your car – you know, the kind that go flat far less often than do old-fashioned tires?  No telling how many tire-repairing jobs have been destroyed by modern technology-infused tires.

Do you and your family refuse flu shots in order to increase your chances of requiring the services of nurses and M.D.s – and, if the economy gets lucky and you and yours get seriously ill, also of hospital orderlies and administrators?  Someone as aware as you are of the full ramifications of your consumption choices surely takes account of the ill effects that flu shots have on the jobs of health-care providers.

You must, indeed, be distressed as you observe the appalling amount of labor-saving technologies in use throughout our economy.  It is, alas, a disturbing trend that has been around for quite some time – since, really, the invention of the spear which destroyed the jobs of some hunters. …

Then again, maybe Barbara Lee takes the lead from her president. This post from The Money Illusion contains an item from the Suskind book about the administration. If you remember, Obama had the same problem with ATM machines.

A couple days ago I suggested that Obama might not be particularly well-informed about economics:

“It seems increasingly clear that Obama doesn’t have a good understanding of economics.  He approaches issues like a very bright non-economist using his common sense.”

It now appears that it’s even worse than I thought.  I found this quotation from Ron Suskind over at DeLong’s blog. 

‘ Both, in fact, were concerned by something the President had said in a morning briefing: that he thought the high unemployment was due to productivity gains in the economy.  Summers and Romer were startled.

“What was driving unemployment was clearly deficient aggregate demand,” Romer said.  “We wondered where this could be coming from.  We both tried to convince him otherwise.  He wouldn’t budge.” ‘

Mort Zuckerman was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

‘It’s as if he doesn’t like people,” says real-estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman of the president of the United States. Barack Obama doesn’t seem to care for individuals, elaborates Mr. Zuckerman, though the president enjoys addressing millions of them on television.

The Boston Properties CEO is trying to understand why Mr. Obama has made little effort to build relationships on Capitol Hill or negotiate a bipartisan economic plan. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Zuckerman wrote in these pages two months ago that the entire business community was “pleading for some kind of adult supervision” in Washington and “desperate for strong leadership.” Writing soon after the historic downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt by Standard & Poor’s, he wrote, “I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country.”

His words struck a chord. When I visit Mr. Zuckerman this week in his midtown Manhattan office, he reports that three people approached him at dinner the previous evening to discuss his August op-ed. Among business executives who supported Barack Obama in 2008, he says, “there is enormously widespread anxiety over the political leadership of the country.” Mr. Zuckerman reports that among Democrats, “The sense is that the policies of this government have failed. . . . What they say about [Mr. Obama] when he’s not in the room, so to speak, is astonishing.” …

… Unprompted, he spends much of our discussion reminiscing about the Reagan presidency. Mr. Zuckerman has for years owned U.S. News and World Report, and in 1986 its Moscow correspondent Nicholas Daniloff was seized without warning by the KGB.

Mr. Zuckerman immediately flew to Russia but returned home when Soviet officials refused to release their new prisoner. “I worked in the White House for the next four weeks virtually every day and through that I met Reagan,” says Mr. Zuckerman. Reagan secured Mr. Daniloff’s release in a swap that included a Soviet spy held in the U.S.

“Reagan surprised me,” says Mr. Zuckerman. “He got the point of every argument. . . . He was very decisive. And everybody loved working for him. They followed his lead because they really respected his decisiveness and his instincts.”

‘I was not a Republican and I was not an admirer of his before I knew him,” continues Mr. Zuckerman. “And you know, Harry Truman had a wonderful definition for the presidency. He said the president has to be someone who can persuade the American people to do what they don’t want to do and to like it. And that’s what you have to do. Somebody like Reagan had that authority. He was liked so much and he had a kind of moral authority. That’s what this president has lost.”

“Democracy does not work without the right leadership,” he says later, “and you can’t play politics.” The smile inspired by Reagan memories is gone now and Mr. Zuckerman is pounding his circular conference table. “The country has got to come to the conclusion at some point that what you’re doing is not just because of an ideology or politics but for the interests of the country.”

Nile Gardiner notes the 1,000 days of this administration.

If recent polls are any indication, it is doubtful that President Obama will enjoy another 1,000 days in the White House. And looking at his track record over the course of his first 33 months in office, it is not hard to see why. It is hard to think of a presidency in modern times that has done more to damage the United States both at home and abroad than the current one, with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter’s. Like his Democratic predecessor in the 1970’s, Barack Obama has left the world’s dominant superpower on its knees, with faith in US leadership now being questioned across the globe.

Since taking office in January 2009, President Obama has ushered in a period of relentless economic decline for the United States. His administration has added $4.2 trillion to the national debt (now standing at $14.9 trillion), lost 2.2 million jobs, introduced a vastly expensive health-care albatross, and spent nearly $800 billion on a failed stimulus package. At the same time, house prices across the country have tumbled at an unprecedented rate, consumer confidence has plummeted, and millions more Americans are now dependent upon food stamps. International confidence in the US economy has fallen to its lowest levels in decades, with credit agency Standard and Poor’s downgrading of America’s AAA credit rating for the first time in 70 years in August this year. …

More from the Washington Times. 

One day soon, someone will write a book titled “The Stumbling, Bumbling, One-Term Presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.” It will be a best-seller – off the nonfiction shelf, of course.

Every presidency is, to be sure, fraught with missteps, mistakes and even fundamental misunderstandings of the task at hand. But President Obama has taken those pitfalls to new heights, and in so doing has exposed what can be called only “Amateur Hour in the White House.”

Just in the past month or so, the president and his jejune minions have delivered every bit of evidence needed to support the theory that no one in the big house knows what they’re doing. …

How about someone from the left. Like a card carrying liberal like Eleanor Clift.

… Washington’s scandal du jour has been Solyndra. The California solar company received a rushed half-billion-dollar clean-energy stimulus loan from the Obama administration, only to go bankrupt and potentially leave taxpayers on the hook—despite warnings from career officials that both Solyndra and the larger solar industry were facing financial pressures.

But it is far from the only blemish on the administration’s much-touted green agenda. In addition to weatherization problems, an internal Labor Department report disclosed this month that a multibillion-dollar program to retrain workers for green-energy jobs met only 10 percent of its goal of creating 80,000 jobs. A federal renewable-energy lab in Colorado that got nearly $300 million from another green-energy program began laying off 10 percent of its workforce last month.

Overall, as the $787 billion economic stimulus—the primary engine for the green-energy agenda—came to an end Sept. 30, it is clear that the program created far fewer jobs than promised. So-called green-collar jobs are notoriously hard to tally, but numerous estimates by gleeful Republicans put the taxpayer cost of each green-energy job created by the stimulus at more than $1 million. …

More from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Can we finally put to rest the idea that government creates jobs? Can everyone finally agree that “green jobs” will never be part of an economic recovery — in Nevada or anywhere else?

There is simply no spinning or distorting the failure of one of President Obama’s biggest initiatives and campaign promises. “Hope” and “Change” hinged on creating 5 million green jobs in 10 years. As a down payment, the stimulus abomination set aside billions of dollars, including a $500 million grant to train 125,000 people for the noble work of the future.

As of this summer, of the nearly 53,000 people who had completed the training at a cost of $163 million, barely 8,000 had found work. Only 1,000 had held a job for more than six months, according to a report released this month by the Labor Department’s inspector general.

Is America just not ready for such new, high-tech positions heralding an age of renewable energy? Could that explain why so many people training for the jobs of the future can’t find work today?

Well, no. According to the inspector general’s report, some of the positions that fall under the administration’s definition of “green jobs” include: forklift operator, sheet metal worker, welder, plumber, electrician, car mechanic and garbage handler.

Did you really think 5 million people in this country would hold sustainable jobs manufacturing, assembling and maintaining solar panels and wind turbines? If you do anything that could conceivably benefit the environment — install a no-flush urinal or an energy-efficient appliance, drive a hybrid bus, collect used cooking oils, lobby against fossil fuels — you are a green-collar worker, as far as Washington is concerned. …

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Mark Steyn ponders what decline will look like.

… Whenever the economy goes south, experts talk of the housing “bubble,” the tech “bubble,” the credit “bubble.” But the real bubble is the 1950 “American moment,” and our failure to understand that moments are not permanent. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the only industrial power with its factories intact and its cities not reduced to rubble, and assumed that that unprecedented pre-eminence would last forever: We would always be so far ahead and so flush with cash that we could do anything and spend anything, and we would still be No. 1. That was the thinking of Detroit’s automakers when they figured they could afford to buy off the unions. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases. And yes, Detroit is an outlier, but look at the assumptions its rulers made, and then wonder whether it will seem quite such an outlier in the future.

Take, for example, the complaints of the young Americans currently “occupying” Wall Street. Many protesters have told sympathetic reporters that “it’s our Arab Spring.” Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the “Occupy” demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months’ time. They’re worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U.

One sympathizes. When college tuition is $50,000 a year, you can’t “work your way through college” – because, after all, an 18-year-old who can earn 50-grand a year wouldn’t need to go to college, would he? Nevertheless, his situation is not the same as some guy halfway up the Nile living on $2 a day: One is a crisis of the economy, the other is a crisis of decadence. And, generally, the former are far easier to solve. …

More of this from Robert Samuelson.

A specter haunts America: downward mobility. Every generation, we believe, should live better than its predecessor. By and large, Americans still embrace that promise. A Pew survey earlier this year found that 48 percent of respondents felt that their children’s living standards would exceed their own. Although that’s down from 61 percent in 2002, it’s on a par with the mid-1990s. But these expectations could be dashed. For young Americans, the future could be dimmer.

Along with jobs, the 2012 presidential election could be fought over this issue. “Can the Middle Class Be Saved?” worried a recent cover story in the Atlantic. Pessimism rises with schooling. In the Pew poll, 54 percent of respondents with a high-school diploma or less felt their children would do better; only 35 percent of graduate school alums agreed. “A kind of depression has set in,” writes Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. “We’ve lost our mojo, our groove.”

It can be argued that all this glumness repeats a historical error: projecting the present onto the future. Just because the economy is rotten today doesn’t mean that it will always be. After World War II, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Fogel has recalled, there was widespread “alarm about massive unemployment.” Eleven million veterans and 9 million defense industry workers had to be re-employed. People feared a new Depression. It didn’t happen, because pent-up demand for homes, cars and appliances fueled a hiring boom.

Unfortunately, this caveat is only half relevant now. …

Last week David Harsanyi had a go at a manifesto for the Occupy Wall Street folks. This week Barton Hinkle from the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a turn. We need this after the first two items.

We are the union members, students, teachers, veterans and activists who make up the 99 percent of America, if you don’t count everybody who is at work right now. We are the unemployed and the art majors and the interns for Rainforest Action Now!

Also we are the firefighters and the police officers and the paramedics, except none of them could be here on account of their fascist shift supervisors, but we know they are with us in spirit. (First responders, you guys rock!) We are the lost, the slightly disoriented, and the people who are pretty sure they know where they are if you’d just be quiet for one second and let us think, okay? Jeez.

Where were we? Oh yeah. We are the makers of homeopathic medicines. We are also the Druids. There’s a couple of Zoroastrians around here somewhere, too (or at least that is what some of us think the tattoo on the one dude’s neck means).

Also, we are that long-haired welder guy who makes bird sculptures out of rebar and old gardening equipment. We are Slightly Creepy Hippie Lady in a Van Who Sells Healing Crystals. We are the young woman with the piercings and the pink hair who just came from the D.C. Slutwalk. We are the guys in goatees and motorcycle boots who can’t ride a motorcycle, who are hoping to score with Pink-Hair Girl.

We are the 99 percent. And we are Here to Stay.

Megan McArdle does a wonderful job of tracking the green jobs money. You will be amazed where the cash went. She made a very good info-graphic that we are unable to fit into our format so you must follow the link to see more than the little bit in the Word or PDF versions.

Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison just resigned, as the controversy stubbornly refuses to go away.  Seems worth revisiting the loans once again, since I’ve spent a little time looking more deeply at the program over the past few days.

Supporters of these programs claim that they’re a necessary part of winning the green future because these are investments that are too risky, or too big, for private capital to take on.  

Of course, if the government is going to be a VC, supporters say, they have to expect a high failure rate. There’s a lot of talk about the manufacturing “Valley of Death“, where startup manufacturing firms may have difficulty getting capital to commercialize their prototypes.  According to proponents of this theory, there’s plenty of money for early stage ventures, and plenty of bank loans for established firms, but no money for mass commercialization of new manufacturing ideas.  (Hence the “valley”).  This valley, they say, is especially wide for energy firms, because the capital costs for starting up are so high.

I’ve been somewhat skeptical of those claims–why are people pouring money into manufacturing startups if they’re inevitably doomed to die at the commercialization stage?  But say it’s true.  I thought it was worth looking at who got the money from these programs, and for what.  How well is the government doing in its role of VC/valley of death sherpa?

So I went to the DOE’s website and manually copied the data on the loan programs.  I didn’t scrutinize all of the projects–I’ve already spent more time on this than is probably justified.  But I looked at the biggest ones.  I put all the number into pretty graphs.  And then I thought I’d share those graphs with you, because hell, I have them.  

What I’m trying to say is, I just made my first infographic. …

Michael Barone celebrates the end of high speed rail.

Dead. Kaput. Through. Finished. Washed up. Gone-zo.

That, I think, is a fair description of the Obama administration’s attempt to build high-speed rail lines across America.

It hasn’t failed because of a lack of willingness to pony up money. The Obama Democrats’ February 2009 stimulus package included $8 billion for high-speed rail projects. The Democratic Congress appropriated another $2.5 billion.

But Congress is turning off the spigot. The Republican-controlled House has appropriated zero dollars for high-speed rail. The Democratic-majority Senate Appropriations Committee has appropriated $100 million in their budget recommendation.

That’s effectively “a vote of ‘no confidence’ to President Obama’s infrastructure initiative,” concludes transportation analyst Ken Orski, “a bipartisan signal that Congress has no appetite for pouring more money into a venture that many lawmakers have come to view as a poster child for wasteful spending.” …

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Streetwise Professor on the administration’s Friday afternoon dump of CLASS (Community Living Assistance Services and Supports)

One element of Obamacare, the CLASS program (a long term care program) has flatlined.  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, officially acknowledged what had been known since the get go: the program was not economically feasible.  So she pulled the plug.

CLASS was one of the myriad pieces of legislative-financial legerdemain used to make believe that Obamacare would actually reduce future deficits.

The budgetary impacts of Obamacare were made up out of the whole cloth: CLASS was just the most egregious example of that.  To create the fiction that Obamacare would save money, Congress and the administration resorted to budgetary and accounting tricks that were so outrageous that even the Greeks would have blanched at the thought of using them when presenting their fiscal numbers in to qualify for the Eurozone.

Yes.  That bad.

Obamacare is not only a policy disaster, it is a fiscal time bomb.  One would hope that the premature detonation of CLASS will put Congress and the country on warning, and result in the defusing of the rest of the whole dangerous mess.  That, unfortunately, will have to wait until January 2013, at the earliest.

Jennifer Rubin on the demise of CLASS.

… To say that this is an embarrassment for the gang in the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership, who we already knew could not shoot straight, would be a gross understatement. The failure of CLASS, predicted by conservatives, sprang from the Democrats’ insistence to pass some “historic” health-care bill, any such bill, and deal with the consequences later. Well, later is now. You can be sure that this — along with the failed stimulus bill, the high unemployment rate and the massive debt — will be frequent features in Republicans’ 2012 ads.

Charles Krauthammer sums up the Obama strategy.

What do you do if you can’t run on your record — on 9 percent unemployment, stagnant growth and ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see? How to run when you are asked whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago and you are compelled to answer no?

Play the outsider. Declare yourself the underdog. Denounce Washington as if the electorate hasn’t noticed that you’ve been in charge of it for nearly three years.

But above all: Find villains.

President Obama first tried finding excuses, blaming America’s dismal condition on Japanese supply-chain interruptions, the Arab Spring, European debt and various acts of God.

Didn’t work. Sounds plaintive, defensive. Lacks fight, which is what Obama’s base lusts for above all.

Hence Obama’s new strategy: Don’t whine, blame. Attack. Indict. Accuse. Who? The rich — and their Republican protectors — for wrecking America.

In Obama’s telling, it’s the refusal of the rich to “pay their fair share” that jeopardizes Medicare. If millionaires don’t pony up, schools will crumble. Oil-drilling tax breaks are costing teachers their jobs. Corporate loopholes will gut medical research.  …

This piece by Steve Hayward is a little long, but he needs time to explain why it is today’s liberals heart Ronald Reagan.

Of all the unlikely developments in American politics over the last two decades, the most astonishing is this: liberals suddenly love Ronald Reagan. They have taken to celebrating certain virtues they claim Reagan possessed—virtues they believe are absent from the conservative body politic today—while looking back with nostalgia at the supposed civility of the political struggles of the 1980s.

“There’s something there I miss today,” mused the former Democratic staffer and longtime talk-show host Chris Matthews in January about the relationship between Reagan and House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, the most powerful Democrat in Washington during Reagan’s first term. Matthews dreamily evoked a time when Reagan and O’Neill had drinks together, swapped Irish stories, slapped backs, and, they say, cut deals with a minimum of personal rancor—as opposed to the ugly relations between the two parties today.

Even more notable is the fact that Reagan has become a model for presidential governance for . . . Barack Obama. Time, having proclaimed Obama to be the second coming of FDR in January 2009, abandoned that image in favor of declaring an Obama “bromance” with Reagan in January 2011. The White House’s press office revealed that Obama had read Lou Cannon’s biography of Reagan over the 2010 Christmas holidays, a choice that might once have seemed as incongruous as John F. Kennedy reading up on Calvin Coolidge. Obama even wrote an homage to Reagan for USA Today in February at the time of Reagan’s centennial birthday. “Reagan recognized the American people’s hunger for accountability and change,” the president said, thereby conferring on Reagan two of his most cherished political slogans.

All in all, say Time’s Michael Duffy and Michael Scherer, “there is no mistaking Obama’s increasing reliance on his predecessor’s career as a helpful template for his own.” After all, Reagan governed during a punishing recession with horrific unemployment, both of which led to a bad midterm election for his party and approval ratings in the 30s—only to win a 49-state landslide reelection. It is only natural for Obama and his political team to look at Reagan’s example to glean lessons about how they might achieve a similar result in 2012. …

Charlie Gasparino says the “flea party” is picketing the wrong people.

Here’s an important irony lost on those zany and sometimes violent Wall Street protesters: On the day that they extended their near riots from the financial district to the swanky uptown neighborhoods where many of the Wall Street millionaires live, we got proof positive that the ranks of the wealthiest Wall Streeters are shrinking.

Which is rotten news for the massive New York City welfare state that the protesters say they want to protect.

The proof comes from a new report by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli that confirms much that’s been said and reported on these pages: The number of Wall Street fat cats is shrinking fairly dramatically, and will continue to shrink in the years ahead — meaning even less money coming from one of New York’s most important sources of tax revenue.

It also confirms something else reported recently on these pages: Rather than heading uptown to the homes of people like JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, the protesters should be marching south — way south — to protest the Washington lawmakers who gave us the jobs-killing Dodd-Frank financial reform. …

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Spengler gives a Mid-East exam.

Here’s your final exam question in Middle Eastern studies:

A mass of Coptic Christians marches through Cairo to protest the military government’s failure to protect them from Muslim radicals. They are attacked by stone-throwing, club-wielding rowdies. Armed forces security personnel intervene, and the Copts fight it out with the soldiers, with two dozen dead and scores injured on both sides. Who is to blame?

The full credit answer is: Benjamin Netanyahu, for building apartments in Jerusalem. If that’s not what you wrote, don’t blame me if you can’t get a job at the New York Times.

Rarely in the course of human events have so few been blamed by so much for so many. There are precedents, for example, when Adolf Hitler claimed that a Jewish “stab in the back” lost World War I for Germany. The notion that the problems of three hundred million Arabs revolve around the governance of a few million Palestinians has the same order of credibility. …

Nile Gardiner says the recently uncovered Iran DC terror bombing plot hangs a BS label on Obama’s approach to the Mullahs.

The foiled plot by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States is a slap in the face for the Obama administration, after its efforts to extend the hand of friendship to the brutal regime in Tehran. As Con Coughlin noted earlier, this should be a wake-up call for the White House. As it has done with Russia, the Obama presidency has attempted to “reset” relations with Iran. But with both Moscow and Tehran, Washington has failed. Both hostile powers have grown emboldened and aggressive in the face of American weakness, and Iran’s brazen attempt to kill a foreign diplomat in the capital city of the United States showcases the folly of the White House’s softly-softly approach towards the ruling mullahs.

While Washington dithers, Iran is marching closer and closer to developing a nuclear weapon, which according to some estimates is just six months away. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to threaten Israel with genocide, while the Obama administration has significantly cooled relations with Jerusalem – hardly the right signal to send to a close friend and ally at a time of mounting tensions in the Middle East. …

Friday afternoon is when the administration gives us the news they hope will be ignored. National Review editors are on the job though.

In a Friday bad-news dump that was a whopper even by its own standards, the Obama administration added to the announcement of a near-record annual deficit and an escalation of undeclared war in Uganda the news that the CLASS Act, an ill-conceived adjunct of the Affordable Care Act, is no more. The upshot is this: Obamacare just got a whole lot more expensive than advertised, and there is reason to believe that its Democratic architects have long known this would happen.

The Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act was the brainchild of the late senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, and it was supposed to be a kind of Social Security that provided long-term care for the elderly. It figured heavily into the Democrats’ dubious accounting of the cost of the Affordable Care Act, and at the time of passage was expected to account for $70 billion out of a total $143 billion in “deficit reduction” claimed in the bill.

But that number was a lie twice over. …

Andrew Malcolm lists the percentage of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track.

… However, since the sixth month of his White House lease Obama’s right track number has been on the southbound track.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, 91% of Republicans believe the country is on the wrong track.

Ominously, though, fully 80% of  independents, so crucial to any president’s election, are now convinced the country is on the wrong track.

And a substantial majority of Democrats, those expected to be the most loyal to the Chicagoan, are also now thinking wrong track by 59%.

Time for the Real Good Talker to give some more speeches.

Karlyn Bowman and Andrew Rugg from AEI say that’s not the only problem for the president.

President Obama is in deep political trouble. While that’s hardly news—the president’s approval rating sits at 40 percent in the latest Gallup poll—the picture is much bleaker than that figure would suggest. Comparing President Obama to other incumbent presidents at this point in the campaign on a variety of indicators shows how grim the picture is for the 44th president.

Just 11 percent of respondents say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the country in Gallup’s most recent poll. Only Jimmy Carter had numbers like this: In November 1979, 19 percent reported they were satisfied with the way things are going in the country. …

Joel Kotkin explains the changes that have come to Silicon Valley. Sitting at the commanding heights doesn’t create many jobs.

Even before Steve Jobs crashed the scene in late 1970s, California’s technology industry had already outpaced the entire world, creating the greatest collection of information companies anywhere. It was in this fertile suburban soil that Apple — and so many other innovative companies — took root.

Now this soil is showing signs of exhaustion, with Jobs’ death symbolizing the end of the state’s high-tech heroic age.

“Steve’s passing really makes you think how much the Valley has changed,” says Leslie Parks, former head of economic development for the city of San Jose, Silicon Valley’s largest city. “The Apple II was produced here and depended on what was unique here. In those days, we were the technology food chain from conception to product. Now we only dominate the top of the chain.”

Silicon Valley’s job creation numbers are dismal. In 1999 the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area had over 1 million jobs; by 2010 that number shrank by nearly 150,000. Although since 2007 and early 2010 the number of information jobs has increased substantially — up roughly 5000 to a total of 46,000 — the industrial sector, which still employs almost four times as many people as IT, lost around 12,000. Overall the region’s unemployment stands at 10%, well above the national average of 9.1% …

Debra Saunders says there’s no fool like a “green jobs” fool. 

Before the Senate failed to pass his American Jobs Act Tuesday, President Obama made a last-ditch speech to talk up his troubled bill. But not once did Obama mention “green jobs” – his erstwhile jobs of the future.

Smart move. Obama’s $787 billion 2009 stimulus package included $500 million for green-jobs training programs that were supposed to create new middle-class jobs for thousands of Americans. Last month, however, the Department of Labor’s inspector general conducted an audit that found, as of June 30 with one-third of the funds spent and more than 50,000 participants, that only 10 percent of trainees were placed in jobs. And only 1,336 participants (or 2 percent) had held jobs for six months or longer.

The audit reported that grant recipients “expressed concerns that green jobs had not materialized and job placements into subsidized employment had been much less than expected.”  …

At dinner a few days ago, Pickerhead expressed the thought it is impossible for our society to move forward until we can reconcile the competing narratives about the causes of the credsis. Here’s another attempt as a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed addresses the Occupiers. You know, the left’s version of the tea party – what Ann Coulter calls the “flea party.” 

There is no mystery where the Occupy Wall Street movement came from: It is an offspring of the same false narrative about the causes of the financial crisis that exculpated the government and brought us the Dodd-Frank Act. According to this story, the financial crisis and ensuing deep recession was caused by a reckless private sector driven by greed and insufficiently regulated. It is no wonder that people who hear this tale repeated endlessly in the media turn on Wall Street to express their frustration with the current conditions in the economy.

Their anger should be directed at those who developed and supported the federal government’s housing policies that were responsible for the financial crisis.

Beginning in 1992, the government required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct a substantial portion of their mortgage financing to borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities. The original legislative quota was 30%. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development was given authority to adjust it, and through the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations HUD raised the quota to 50% by 2000 and 55% by 2007. …

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David Goldman has long predicted Egypt would descend into chaos.

Sunday’s massacre of protesting Copts is heartbreaking; from the initial reports, several thousand Christians marched to protest the military government’s blind eye towards Muslim violence “when they were attacked by thugs carrying swords and clubs,” according to one Copt. The Egyptian government says that the Christian protesters began firing live ammunition at soldiers. That stretches credibility. …

… No-one appears in charge. Central bank foreign exchange reserves are down to just $19 billion, or four months’ imports, the Financial Times reported last week. “After negotiating a loan from the International Monetary Fund, the military council decided to scrap it, partly on fears of popular criticism – the IMF has a negative reputation in Egypt because of its association with harsh structural adjustment programmes. In addition, only $500m of some $7bn of promised aid from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have arrived so far.”

Egypt literally will run out of food. It imports half its caloric consumption, mainly wheat (although Egyptians eat less wheat than Iranians, Moroccans, Canadians, Turks and Russians). Egypt spends $5.5 billion a year on food subsidies. Its social solidarity minister wants to change the system (which subsidizes some people who can afford to pay more than the penny a loaf the government charges), but seems deeply confused. “‘We need to change consumer habits so that we are not consuming so much bread. In Mexico, for example, they rely more on potatoes. Why can’t we start shifting toward that?’said Saad Nassar, adviser to the agriculture minister.” Mr. Nassar seems unaware that Mexicans eat more corn than wheat or potatoes. This discussion would be comical if not for the fact that Egypt is about to run out of money to pay for any sort of food. …

Andrew McCarthy and Mark Steyn post on Egypt in The Corner. Here’s Mark.

Andy, good luck rousing the western media to the plight of Egypt’s Christians. The boobs proclaimed Tahrir Square an “Arab Spring” and then moved on. I chanced to be on Fox News with Megyn Kelly half-an-hour after Mubarak threw in the towel, and, while Anderson Cooper was cooing orgasmically over on CNN, offered the cheerless thought that this was the dawn of the post-western Middle East, and the beginning of something potentially very dark. I’ll stand by that. As I wrote in February:

“The Kingdom of Egypt in the period between 1922 and 1952 was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it got closer to a functioning, pluralist society than anything in the 60 years since. For example, in 1923, Egypt’s first full year as a sovereign state, the country’s Minister of Finance was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a Member of Parliament and a Jew.”

Try to imagine that now: a Jew serving as an Arab Muslim nation’s Finance Minister – or even getting elected as an obscure backbench MP. Sounds like something from a Give-peace-a-chance multifaith fantasy. But it actually happened – and then it stopped happening, and then it became inconceivable for it to happen ever again under any plausible scenario.

Shortly thereafter, Mr Cattaui’s great-grandson wrote to me from France, where he now lives. Because it’s not just that in Egypt a Jew can’t be Finance Minister but that a Jew can’t be. Because Egypt spent the second half of the 20th century getting worse, and is spending the new century getting worser. We now accept a Jew-free Egypt as a normal feature of life. No doubt we shall soon do the same with a Copt-free Egypt. But we could at least stop insulting those on the receiving end of the “Arab Spring” by pretending that it’s any kind of flowering of freedom.

Marc Thiessen details the mistakes of the “hapless” Holder.

President Obama says that he has “complete confidence” in Attorney General Eric Holder. That’s good news for Republicans. Pick almost any unnecessary, losing battle in Obama’s first term, and his hapless attorney general is at the center of it.

If not for the fact that so many of Holder’s decisions harm national security, he would be a political dream come true for the GOP – delivering up reliably disastrous controversies for the president every few months.

The latest controversy over whether Holder misled a House committee on “Operation Fast and Furious” — the botched federal gun sting that allowed hundreds of weapons to flow to Mexican drug cartels and resulted in the death of an ATF agent — is only the most recent of these debacles.

Holder’s bad advice began almost immediately after Obama took office, when he and White House counsel Greg Craig convinced the president to announce the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010 — without even examining the feasibility of doing so. Not only did the president suffer the indignity of missing this deadline, public opinion turned against the decision so sharply that Democrats abandoned the president and joined Republicans in voting 90-to-6 in the Senate to block funds for the facility’s closure. Almost three years later, Guantanamo remains open and the administration has given up hope of closing it.

The next unneeded firestorm came with Holder’s decision to release classified Justice Department memos on the CIA terrorist interrogation program and reopen criminal investigations into the conduct of CIA interrogators. Holder overrode the objections of five CIA directors, including Leon Panetta. According to The Post, “Before his decision to reopen the cases, Holder did not read detailed memos that [career] prosecutors drafted and placed in files to explain their decision to decline prosecutions.” If he had bothered to do so, he could have predicted the eventual outcome: The special prosecutor he appointed came to the same conclusion as the career prosecutors under the Bush administration and found no criminal wrongdoing by the CIA officials involved in the agency’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. After two years of wasted resources and needless controversy, Holder came up empty. …

Continuing with the Holder theme, Roger Simon reviews the book written by a career lawyer in the Justice Dept. who quit in disgust.

J. Christian Adams is an American hero and his new book INJUSTICE: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department is an indispensable work for our time.

But be warned that I — as reviewers often are, even if they don’t say so — am biased, quite obviously so. From page 155 of Adams’ book: “The following week, I received an unexpected phone call from Roger Simon asking me to become a contributor to his media site Pajamas Media, one of the leading conservative news websites. I accepted his offer, and soon began writing about issues such as civil rights and the ongoing activities of the Obama DOJ.”

I make no claim of editorial brilliance for drafting Christian then. An attorney for the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice, he had just resigned after the testimony of Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez in the now infamous New Black Panther case. He wanted to blow the whistle on what he came to call the racialist (inordinately tilted in favor of minorities, largely African-American) policies and actions of the DOJ. And I was the perfect audience — having been a voter registration worker myself during the Civil Rights Movement (South Carolina 1966). I was appalled by what he told me.

So I do take inordinate pride in the subsequent writings of Christian Adams on PJMedia. They have had a significant, and growing, impact on our country and justice system. They are arguably the most socially useful articles our company has published.

That out of the way, let me turn to why I believe Injustice may be the most important American publication this year. …

Thomas Sowell also reviews Adams’ book.

… Attorney General Eric Holder became a key figure epitomizing the view that government’s role in racial matters was not to be an impartial dispenser of equal justice for all, but to be a racial partisan and an organ of racial payback. He has been too politically savvy to say that in so many words, but his actions have spoken far louder than any words.

The case that first gave the general public a glimpse of Attorney General Holder’s views and values was one in which young black thugs outside a voting site in Philadelphia were televised intimidating white voters. When this episode was broadcast, it produced public outrage.

Although the Department of Justice’s prosecution of these thugs began in the last days of the Bush administration, and the defendants had offered no legal defense, the case was dropped by the Justice Department after Eric Holder took over. One of the lawyers who were prosecuting that case resigned in protest.

That lawyer — J. Christian Adams — has now written a book, titled “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” It is a thought-provoking book and a shocking book in what it reveals about the inner workings of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division.

Bad as the Justice Department’s decision was to drop that particular case, which it had already won in court, this book makes painfully clear that this was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. …

Peter Wehner writes on the “divisive” president.

A Washington Post story from earlier this week reports, “There is a noticeably more aggressive, confrontational President Obama roaming the country these days, selling his jobs plan and attacking Republicans for standing in the way of progress by standing up only for the rich.” That report, if anything, understates things a bit. Obama has essentially given up on his governing responsibilities (at which he has shown himself to be terribly inept) in lieu of a fierce and near constant attack on his political opponents. I have my doubts as to whether that strategy will work. But the point I want to make is a different one, which is that Obama has become the most intentionally divisive president we’ve seen in quite some time.

It’s not unusual, of course, for the policies of presidents to divide the nation. And politicians running for re-election often highlight differences. But Obama now belongs in a separate category. Each day, it seems, he and/or his supporters are seeking to divide us. The rhetoric employed by the president and his allies is meant to fan the flames of resentment, to turn Americans against one another, and to stoke up feelings of envy, grievances, and rage.

This is not healthy for our country or good for our political culture. And while we all contribute to what constitutes public discourse, there is one officeholder, the president, who bears the greatest responsibility for creating a sense of common purpose and for reminding us that we are, in the words of the Pledge of Allegiance, “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Yet the president is trying, with almost every speech, to pry us apart. It’s a strategy he clearly believes is necessary for him to win re-election. But that doesn’t make what he’s doing any less shameful or any less hypocritical. …

And Steve Hayward posts in Powerline on the ignorant president. Seems he wanted to go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to apologize. The Japanese saved him from that mistake. If you read Pickings from July 14th, you’ll remember Pickerhead retailed the thought that Truman saved many Japanese lives with his decisions to drop the bombs.

I recall seeing some online grandee—I thought it was Rich Karlgaard of Forbes, but I can’t find it—explain that in the fullness of time Wikileaks would turn around and bite liberals in the rear end, and sure enough there’s been a steady stream of Wikileaks that confirm what we already know about Obama.  But still.

Over the last couple of weeks several Japanese newspapers have been all over a new Wikileak that so far has not made much of an impression anywhere in American media.  (I know: This is a surprise?)  It seems that Obama wanted to include stops at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of his 2009 World Apology Tour, so that he could apologize for Harry Truman dropping the Big One to end World War II.

Telegraph, UK with a story about a photo from our difficult past.

On her first morning of school, September 4 1957, Elizabeth Eckford’s primary concern was looking nice. Her mother had done her hair the night before; an elaborate two-hour ritual, with a hot iron and a hotter stove, of straightening and curling. Then there were her clothes. People in black Little Rock knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore they made themselves, and not from the basic patterns of McCall’s but from the more complicated ones in Vogue. It was a practice borne of tradition, pride, and necessity: homemade was cheaper, and it spared black children the humiliation of having to ask to try things on in the segregated department stores downtown.

In the fall of 1957, Elizabeth was among the nine black students who had enlisted, then been selected, to enter Little Rock Central High School.

Central was the first high school in a major southern city set to be desegregated since the United States Supreme Court had ruled three years earlier in Brown vs Board of Education that separate and ostensibly equal education was unconstitutional. Inspired both by Thurgood Marshall, who had argued the case of plaintiff Oliver L Brown, and Clarence Darrow, Elizabeth wanted to become a lawyer, and she thought Central would help her realise that dream.

On the television as Elizabeth ate her breakfast, a newsman described large crowds gathering around Central. It was all her mother, Birdie, needed to hear. “Turn that thing off!” she shouted. Should anyone say something nasty at her, she counselled Elizabeth, pretend not to hear them. Or better yet, be nice, and put them to shame.

Lots of white people lined Park Street as Elizabeth headed towards the school. As she passed the Mobil station and came nearer, she could see the white students filtering unimpeded past the soldiers. To her, it was a sign that everything was all right. But as she herself approached, three Guardsmen, two with rifles, held out their arms, directing her to her left, to the far side of Park.

A crowd had started to form behind Elizabeth, and her knees began to shake. She continued down Park. For an instant, she faced the school: it just looked so big! …