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The first three items today look at the prospects for our country. We start with Toby Harnden and the United States of Gloom.

Across America today, people will gather for barbecues in their backyards, parades through their towns and firework displays lighting up the night sky.

They’ll be celebrating Independence Day – the birthday of the United States and the 235th anniversary of shaking off the oppressive yoke of British rule.

On this day in 1776 a group of 13 colonies broke away to found a new nation free to govern itself as it saw fit, pledging that each citizen would have the unalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. A nation, as Americans are apt to declare without equivocation, which became the greatest on the face of the earth.

That’s the good news. On the flip side, however, a country whose hallmark has always been a sense of irrepressible optimism is in the grip of unprecedented uncertainty and self-doubt.

With the United States mired in three foreign wars, beaten down by an economy that shows few signs of emerging from deep recession and deeply disillusioned with President Barack Obama, his Republican challengers and Congress, the mood is dark.

The last comparable Fourth of July was probably in 1980, when there was a recession, skyrocketing petrol prices and an Iranian hostage crisis, with 53 Americans being held in Tehran.

Frank Luntz, perhaps America’s pre-eminent pollster, argues that his countrymen are much more downbeat now than in 1980. “The assumption with the Carter years was that it was a failure of the elites, not the system. We thought the people in charge screwed up. We didn’t blame ourselves.” Remarkably, many Americans think things will only get worse and the good times will never return. …

A columnist for the Financial Times says the problems here and in Europe are similar.

In Washington they are arguing about a debt ceiling; in Brussels they are staring into a debt abyss. But the basic problem is the same. Both the US and the European Union have public finances that are out of control and political systems that are too dysfunctional to fix the problem. America and Europe are in the same sinking boat.

The debt debates underway in the US and the EU are so inward-looking and overwrought that surprisingly few people are making the connection. Yet the links that make this a generalised crisis of the west should be obvious.

On both sides of the Atlantic, it is now clear that much of the economic growth of the pre-crisis years was driven by an unsustainable and dangerous boom in credit. In the US it was homeowners who were at the centre of the crisis; in Europe, it was entire countries like Greece and Italy that took advantage of low interest rates to borrow unsustainably.

The financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath dealt a blow to state finances, as public debts soared. In both Europe and the US this one-off shock is compounded by demographic pressures that are increasing budgetary pressures, as the baby-boomers begin to retire. …

An antidote to this pessimism comes from Walter Russell Mead as he appears in the Wall Street Journal. We have him here often from his blog. It is nice to have his work subjected to WSJ editors. 

It is, the pundits keep telling us, a time of American decline, of a post-American world. The 21st century will belong to someone else. Crippled by debt at home, hammered by the aftermath of a financial crisis, bloodied by long wars in the Middle East, the American Atlas can no longer hold up the sky. Like Britain before us, America is headed into an assisted-living facility for retired global powers.

This fashionable chatter could not be more wrong. Sure, America has big problems. Trillions of dollars in national debt and uncounted trillions more in off-the-books liabilities will give anyone pause. Rising powers are also challenging the international order even as our key Cold War allies sink deeper into decline.

But what is unique about the United States is not our problems. Every major country in the world today faces extraordinary challenges—and the 21st century will throw more at us. Yet looking toward the tumultuous century ahead, no country is better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities or manage the dangers than the United States.

Geopolitically, the doomsayers tell us, China will soon challenge American leadership throughout the world. Perhaps. But to focus exclusively on China is to miss how U.S. interests intersect with Asian realities in ways that cement rather than challenge the U.S. position in world affairs.

Change of subject; we’ll spend some time on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn turnabout. Bret Stephens admits to his schadenfreude 

Almost from the beginning, there was something amiss in the case of People v. Dominique Strauss-Kahn. This was the very specific way in which the managing director of the International Monetary Fund was alleged to have forced himself upon a maid in his pricey Times Square Sofitel suite. More than a few people must have pondered the one-word question—really?—that might have cut short the prosecution’s case before it got rolling.

Then again, who would have dared ask this in print or on air? And who really wanted to, anyway?

Let me confess: I was pretty much delighted by the way L’Affaire DSK seemed to be playing out. When the news broke last Thursday that the case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn was falling apart—that his accuser was a serial liar, a prostitute according to the New York Post, with a $100,000 bank account and ambitions (caught on tape) to turn her supposed tragedy into a get-rich-quick scheme—my immediate reaction was: how disappointing.

Not that I ever took any joy in the thought that a presumably vulnerable woman had apparently been raped by a man with a reputation for promiscuous and predatory appetites.

But I did enjoy the thought of this mandarin of the tax-exemptocracy being pulled from the comfort of his first-class Air France seat and dispatched to Riker’s Island without regard to status or dignity. …

Victor Davis Hanson has his DSK thoughts.

… If the preponderance of evidence in the accuser’s past soon undermines her credibility to such an extent that her word cannot be used against Strauss-Kahn, then we will still be left with a controversy. It will simply be a matter, not of legality, but of Strauss-Kahn’s judgment, morality, and hypocrisy — as is usually the case in high-profile sexual scandals.

So, to recap: To prove his innocence, if the forensic evidence of a sex act turns up, Strauss-Kahn will either have to prove that a young maid he just met was quite willing, in ad hoc fashion in a few minutes between work, to have sex with an older, plump foreign stranger; or that he, in fact, paid money as he may have promised. Either way, I don’t see how that justifies the cries of vindication that we hear coming across from the Atlantic. And no need to mention, as feminists quite rightly remind us, that a past of prostitution, or sexual indiscretion, or some such skullduggery, does not ipsis factis, prove that in a moment of passion, sexual force was not used. 

So as these rumors continue to surface and are spun, we still await to learn whether DSK is guilty of a criminal act, or merely remains a fool and a hypocrite.

Andrew Malcolm has the best of late night humor

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George Will takes up the book “Reckless Endangerment.”

… The louder they talked about the disadvantaged, the more money they made. And the more the financial system tottered.

Who were they? Most explanations of the financial calamity have been indecipherable to people not fluent in the language of “credit default swaps” and “collateralized debt obligations.” The calamity has lacked human faces. No more.

Put on asbestos mittens and pick up “Reckless Endangerment,” the scalding new book by Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times columnist, and Joshua Rosner, a housing finance expert. They will introduce you to James A. Johnson, an emblem of the administrative state that liberals admire.

The book’s subtitle could be: “Cry ‘Compassion’ and Let Slip the Dogs of Cupidity.” Or: “How James Johnson and Others (Mostly Democrats) Made the Great Recession.” The book is another cautionary tale about government’s terrifying self-confidence. It is, the authors say, “a story of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home.”

The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act pressured banks to relax lending standards to dispense mortgages more broadly across communities. In 1992, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston purported to identify racial discrimination in the application of traditional lending standards to those, Morgenson and Rosner write, “whose incomes, assets, or abilities to pay fell far below the traditional homeowner spectrum.” …

History lesson from Democracy in America blog.

… Maybe next time Ms Bachmann discusses this issue, she can gives some credit to Jay, who, in addition to co-authoring The Federalist and serving as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, actually put an end to slavery in New York.

Or how about a shout-out to Gouverneur Morris, the man who actually wrote the final draft of the Constitution? That ought to be a pretty impressive credential to any self-described “constitutional conservative”. Here’s what Morris said, to his eternal credit, on the idea of counting slaves as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of determining representation in the House:

“Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included? The houses in [Philadelphia] are worth more than all the wretched slaves that cover the rice swamps of South Carolina….The admission of slaves into the representation when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with laudable horror so nefarious a practice.” …

Fourth of July message from Thomas Sowell.

… Some clever people today ask whether the United States has really been “exceptional.” You couldn’t be more exceptional in the 18th century than to create your fundamental document — the Constitution of the United States — by opening with the momentous words, “We the people…”

Those three words were a slap in the face to those who thought themselves entitled to rule, and who regarded the people as if they were simply human livestock, destined to be herded and shepherded by their betters. Indeed, to this very day, elites who think that way — and that includes many among the intelligentsia, as well as political messiahs — find the Constitution of the United States a real pain because it stands in the way of their imposing their will and their presumptions on the rest of us.

More than a hundred years ago, so-called “Progressives” began a campaign to undermine the Constitution’s strict limitations on government, which stood in the way of self-anointed political crusaders imposing their grand schemes on all the rest of us. That effort to discredit the Constitution continues to this day, and the arguments haven’t really changed much in a hundred years.

The cover story in the July 4th issue of Time magazine is a classic example of this arrogance. It asks of the Constitution: “Does it still matter?”  …

James Pethokoukis blogs on the president’s presser.

… Maybe the biggest economic issue of the year, other than the anemic recovery, is the National Labor Relations Board attack on Boeing and its decision to open an aircraft assembly line in right-to-work South Carolina. This de facto attempt to impose wage controls on one of America’s largest exporters by limiting where it can do business is a dagger aimed at the heart of the American free enterprise system. But here, sadly, is the president again leading from behind:

“Essentially, the NLRB made a finding that Boeing had not followed the law in making a decision to move a plant.  And it’s an independent agency.  It’s going before a judge.  So I don’t want to get into the details of the case.  I don’t know all the facts.  That’s going to be up to a judge to decide.”

Who knows, maybe the president just has something against jet airplanes,  akin to his apparent dislike of those job-killing ATMs. But this seems certain: Obamanomics took flight in 2009 as a purist Keynesian experiment in economic management from high above. The ultimate Dreamliner for Democrats. Now, two-and-a-half-year later, it’s begun its sputtering descent.

Even Evan Thomas of Obama is “sort of (a) God” has fallen out of Obama love. Ed Morrissey has the story.

… ‘On “Inside Washington,” host Gordon Peterson asked his panel to suggest a way to overcome the current impasse and get Congress and the White House moving on a budget deal. Thomas offered up a solution, but also expressed his frustration with Obama.

“Yeah, because it’s happened before – Obama has got to be President of the United States,” Thomas said. “He has to be two things. He has to make a public case of how bad is this, because he is not doing that. He’s not being honest about just how bad this is going to be — no, he was partisan. He was God [bleep] Democrat! He was just, you know – being a party guy. I applaud the energy but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. He has got to rise above that and then in private, in private – he’s got to make a deal.” …

Peter Wehner has more on the extraordinary press conference.

… In other words, the most memorable example Obama used in his press conference – the need to eliminate a tax loophole for corporate jets – is comparable to trying to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon. And it’s not simply that Obama resorts to this bit of sophistry; it is that in the process he presents himself as the only adult in Washington, America’s intrepid truth teller, our modern-day Socrates.

His intellectual dishonesty and unparalleled self-image would be difficult enough to take separately. Together, it’s all a bit much. The good news is, in the end the truth will out. And I’m betting regardless of how many false statements the president makes, regardless of how many straw men he trots out, he cannot escape the bitter fruits of his policies. In 2008, Obama relied on promises of what he would do. In 2012, he will have to rely on deeds he has done. That will make all the difference.

Events have unmasked Obama. At this juncture it looks as if the president is likely to lose his re-election bid. It’s a shame he is besmirching his public character in the process.

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Dennis Prager has an idea for a Fourth of July Seder. The importance of the Seder can be learned here.

Four years ago, I wrote a column titled “America Needs a July Fourth Seder.” In it I explained that “national memory dies without national ritual. And without a national memory, a nation dies.” Many readers and listeners to my radio show responded by creating their own rituals to make the day far more meaningful than watching fireworks and eating hot dogs.

I now present a simple ten-minute ceremony that every American can easily use on July Fourth. It is a product of the Internet-based Prager University that I founded nearly two years ago. We call it the Fourth of July Declaration and here it is. (A paginated and printable version can be downloaded here.)

It begins with a note to the individual leading the ritual, the “host.”

NOTE TO HOST
We hope this day finds you, your family, and your friends in good health, enjoying another glorious Fourth together. We all love barbecues, parties, and fireworks, but if that’s all the Fourth of July is about, the day has lost its meaning and we lose a vital connection to our American past.

Welcome to our Fourth of July Declaration!  . . .

And, Andrew Malcolm provides the text of the Declaration of Independence.

. . . When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. . . .

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Mark Steyn says there is no independence day for an America that is broke.

… “You go talk to your constituents,” President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, “and ask them are they willing to compromise their kids’ safety so that some corporate jet owner continues to get a tax break?”

In the Republic of Brokistan, that’s the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification! In his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009″ – i.e., the stimulus. The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic Party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama-Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an “economic forum.” …

… Speaking of corporate jets, did the president fly commercial to Denver? Oh, but that’s different! He’s in “public service.” A couple of weeks before he flew Air Force One to Denver, he flew Air Force One to Williamsburg, Virginia. From the White House (well, via Andrews Air Force Base). That’s 150 miles, a 30-minute flight. He took a 747, a wide-bodied jet designed to carry 500 people to the other side of the planet, for a puddle-jump across the Potomac.

Oh, but it was for another “economic forum.” This time with House Democrats – the ones who voted for the Obama Corporate Jet Tax Break. “Economic forums” are what we have instead of an economy these days.

Aside from the Sultan of Brunei and one or two similar potentates, no other head of state goes around like this. In a self-governing republic, it ought to be unbecoming. But in the Brokest Nation in History it’s ridiculous. And the least the beneficiary of such decadence could do is not condescendingly lecture those who pay for their own transportation. America’s debt is an existential crisis, and playing shell games with shriveled peas of demonizable irrelevancies only advertises your contempt for the citizenry. …

… The president has a point about “tax breaks”. We have too many. And on the scale of the present tax code that’s a dagger at the heart of one of the most basic principles of free societies – equality before the law. But, of course, the president is not opposed to exemptions and exceptions and special privileges on principle: After all, he’s issued – what is it now? – over a thousand “waivers” for his own Obamacare law. If you knew who to call in Washington, maybe you got one. If you didn’t, tough.

But that’s the point. Big Government on America’s unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful (as on that Williamsburg flight), stupid (as at the TSA) and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it’s not republican in any sense the Founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you’re a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today’s Americans that this will be the first generation in U.S. history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives – if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin-American-style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass. On Independence Day 2011, debt-ridden America is now dependent, not on far-off kings but on global bond and currency markets, which fulfill the same role the cliff edge does in a Wile E Coyote cartoon. At some point, Wile looks down and realizes he’s outrun solid ground. You know what happens next.  That’s all, folks!

National Review finds a Greek conservative blogger who understands what went wrong in his country – they didn’t have a Tea Party.

Thirty years ago this fall, on October 18, 1981, a charismatic academic with rather limited government experience and with a one-word slogan, “Change,” was elected prime minister of Greece. His name was Andreas Papandreou. Greeks may now wish that 30 years ago they had had a Tea Party movement. Things could have turned out differently.

Thirty years ago, Greece was in an enviable position on the matter of national debt, with its debt just 28.6 percent of GDP. Most advanced countries can manage that kind of debt-to-GDP ratio. By the end of Papandreou’s first term in office, that ratio had nearly doubled, with debt at 54.7 percent of GDP. By the end of his second term, the figure was in the mid 80s.

The 1980s in Greece were a time of dramatic expansion of government. Papandreou and his Socialist party created a new government-run health-care system, dramatically expanded employment in the public sector, nationalized failing companies, and increased government handouts of every shape and form. …

Robert Tracinski, of the Randian Intellectual Activist tries to explain the administration’s economic ignorance.

So I heard the latest economic bulletin from President Obama: that the whole problem with the economy and the federal budget is because of a tax break for corporate jets.

Really? We’re in economic and fiscal trouble because we haven’t raised a tiny little tax on corporate jets? Does the president have any concept of how irrelevant this is? The tax accounts for less than one tenth of one percent of the deficit reduction his negotiations with the Republican are supposed to achieve. Moreover, as he sneers derisively about the owners of corporate jets, does he have any concept of their value to the economy? As someone who has recently traveled on a commercial airliner, let me say that I certainly hope that the nation’s CEOs are not waiting around to be stuffed into coach class on Delta. I certainly hope that they have more efficient travel arrangements and more productive things to do with their time.

Thinking about this latest claim reminded me of the president’s previous economic brainwave: his claim that the reason for high unemployment is automation, as embodied by the new-fangled ATM machine. In response, the Wall Street Journal published a very thorough response explaining how increased productivity from automation creates wealth and therefore not only creates jobs but creates higher-paying jobs.

It was a nicely done piece, but when I was reading it I felt a vague sense of embarrassment. It was all correct and very clearly stated, with good concrete examples–but there was nothing there that I hadn’t read more than twenty years ago, in college. The embarrassment was not for me, but for Obama and his protectors in the mainstream media. How could they not know this already? How is it that they need this to be explained to them?

But then I realized that I went through very much an alternative history compared to Obama. …

Jonah Goldberg responds to the president’s knocks on corporate jets.

… “The idea is to create jobs now, and to make sure America stays on the cutting edge of manufacturing for years to come,” Obama declared.

The factory Obama visited, however, isn’t a generic aluminum plant. It is, according to Alcoa, the “premier aerospace supply plant and is today the hub of Alcoa’s $3 billion aerospace business.”

That includes the general aviation industry, which is centered in Wichita, Kan., where they make private jets “right here in America” as Obama likes to say. The upshot: Obama says that Alcoa must lose business among American customers to repeal a tax break Obama and the Democrats supported because Republicans want to balance the budget.

To be fair, Alcoa’s biggest customers aren’t manufacturers of private jets but the big manufacturers of commercial jets — you know, like Boeing. Well, that company is being told by Obama’s union-hack-packed National Labor Relations Board that it cannot open a new manufacturing plant in South Carolina, because to do so would offend Obama’s beloved unions in Washington State.

The point isn’t that there’s no merit to any of Obama’s positions (personally, I’m all for clearing the junk out of the tax code). The point is that at this point merit simply has nothing to do with the positions Obama takes.

Byron York says curbs on union power are a boon to Wisconsin schools.

“This is a disaster,” said Mark Miller, the Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader, in February after Republican Gov. Scott Walker proposed a budget bill that would curtail the collective bargaining powers of some public employees. Miller predicted catastrophe if the bill were to become law — a charge repeated thousands of times by his fellow Democrats, union officials, and protesters in the streets.

Now the bill is law, and we have some very early evidence of how it is working. And for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it’s a godsend, not a disaster.

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.

In the past, teachers and other staff at Kaukauna were required to pay 10 percent of the cost of their health insurance coverage and none of their pension costs. Now, they’ll pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their coverage (still well below rates in much of the private sector) and also contribute 5.8 percent of salary to their pensions. The changes will save the school board an estimated $1.2 million this year, according to board President Todd Arnoldussen. …

Karl Rove says don’t let 2012 get personal.

… The GOP nominee should fiercely challenge Mr. Obama’s policies, actions and leadership using the president’s own words, but should stay away from questioning his motives, patriotism or character. He will do this to his GOP opponent to try to draw Republicans into the mud pit. They should avoid it.

It won’t be easy. Mr. Obama can’t win re-election by trumpeting his achievements. And he has decided against offering a bold agenda for a second term: That was evident in his State of the Union emphasis on high-speed rail, high-speed Internet and “countless” green jobs.

Instead, backed by a brutally efficient opposition research unit, the president will use focus-group tested lines of attack to disqualify the Republican nominee by questioning his or her values, intentions and intelligence.

Republicans should avoid giving him mistakes to pounce on and should stand up to this withering assault, always looking for ways to turn it back on Mr. Obama and his record. The GOP candidate must express disappointment and regret, not disgust and anger, especially in the debates. Ronald Reagan’s cheery retorts to Jimmy Carter’s often-petty attacks are a good model. Any day that isn’t a referendum on the Obama presidency should be considered wasted. …

Real Clear Markets has more on the politics of “fracking” for natural gas.

You’re Ian Urbina, a senior New York Times reporter. In February and March you write that hydraulic fracturing, a method of natural gas extraction, is contaminating Pennsylvania drinking water. Your accusations are subsequently disproved by government tests.

What do you write next?

You write a three-part series in the Times saying that shale gas production is “inherently unprofitable” and a giant Ponzi scheme, as well as loosely-regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

No matter that many emails you cite quoting industry managers, geologists, government officials, and market analysts are two years old. No matter that two of your supposedly objective sources are environmental activists. No matter that profit-maximizing companies are investing billions of dollars in shale gas.

Over the weekend and on Monday The New York Times ran a three-part series by Mr. Urbina on the bullish outlook for natural gas production in the United States and questioned whether some industry officials and analysts are too optimistic.

The article’s timing is significant. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation will soon issue a new Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement that will decide whether New York State will allow hydrofracturing within its borders in order to tap the Marcellus and Utica Shales.

Pennsylvania produces over 80 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year from the Marcellus Shale, a geologic formation that stretches into New York, giving the state an extra $1.7 billion in economic activity a year and 18,000 jobs.

One wonders whether the Times’s three-part series was meant to nudge the Empire State towards a negative decision. …

Click here for a Reason Magazine video on Fracking Facts.

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James Pethokoukis of Reuters explains why the GOP should hold firm and refuse to raise taxes.

It’s up to House Speaker John Boehner now. Democrats, the media and Wall Street will be pounding him to agree to raise taxes as part of a debt ceiling deal. But now is no time for Republicans to go wobbly. Here’s why the GOP should stick to its guns until Aug. 2 – and beyond if necessary:

1. The last thing the economy needs is a tax hike. If the economy was too weak to absorb a tax hike last December – when the White House and Congress agreed to extend all the Bush tax cuts for two more years –  its health is even worse today. The economy grew at just a 1.9 percent pace in the first quarter, and many economists now think it might grow just 2.0 percent in the second quarter – or even less. This should be a red flag to Washington. New research from the Federal Reserve finds that since 1947, when two-quarter annualized real GDP growth falls below 2 percent, recession follows within a year 48 percent of the time. (And when year-over-year real GDP growth falls below 2 percent, recession follows within a year 70 percent of the time.)

In other words, the economic recovery is sputtering with stall speed fast approaching. Now would be a terrible time to penalize investors and business, both big and small, with new taxes. …

Matthew Continetti, sitting in for Jennifer Rubin says Obama’s fixation on taxes in yesterday’s presser is an indication an agreement is a long way away.

… One of the reasons Obama’s arguments are unlikely to convince Americans is that there is a huge divide between elite and popular opinion streams on the economy. Since the 2008 financial crisis, elites have made promises to the public that have not been kept. Most people were never comfortable with the idea that the only way to preserve the financial system was by bailing out its worst members. The claim that the stimulus bill would keep unemployment at 8 percent or below was proven false long ago. The Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing program has not resulted in sustained recovery.

The idea that the way to solve America’s debt problem is by raising the debt ceiling is the most counterintuitive of them all. The public doesn’t buy it. In the experience of most Americans, the way to get out of debt is to cut up the credit cards and stop spending. They have not read Lord Keynes and doubt whether his prescriptions work in the real world. For them, thrift is not a “paradox” but a virtue. 

This intellectual divide between the president and the public is the reason his ratings on the economy are so poor. One suspects the gap is unbridgeable.

Peter Wehner on the press conference.

During his press conference today, President Obama repeatedly invoked the theme of leadership. “Leaders lead,” he helpfully informed. “Leaders rise to the occasion,” he added. They are willing to make “tough decisions,” to “do the tough things” and to “do the responsible thing.” By the end I was reminded by the line from Emerson: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” …

More on the conference from Yuval Levin.

“Call me naïve,” President Obama told reporters during his press conference yesterday, “but my expectation is that leaders are going to lead.”

I’m not sure “naïve” is right, but terms like “frivolous” and “vain” did come to mind again and again throughout the press conference. The President came before reporters without any news to make. He seemed to want to vent a kind of unfocused rage at Congress for something—criticizing congressional leaders at various points for taking too many breaks, for failing to take up patent reforms and free trade legislation, and generally ignoring the fiscal crisis (all of which, we can only assume, were criticisms of Democratic leaders). And when he turned to Republicans, he argued that they were not making serious proposals in the debt-limit talks. They were failing to lead, he said repeatedly.

It all had the feel of a childish tantrum by a person who desperately wishes he were living in a different reality—one in which he is the heroic man of action and his opponents are irresponsible and weak. But the fact is, the president and congressional Democrats have so far utterly failed to offer any path out of our fiscal problems—problems that they have greatly exacerbated. The president proposed a budget in February that would have increased the deficit, and then he retracted it in April and proposed nothing in particular in its place. Senate Democrats have not proposed a budget in two years; …

 Andrew Malcolm catches the president talking about the economy.

… He admitted that things are not good for millions of Americans and said it was going to take even more time to do what his vice president promised would be happening 14 months ago.

How could the awful economic hole from you-know-who keep getting deeper 889 days after the guy fled back to Texas?

Obama stated:

“For a lot of Americans, those numbers don’t matter much if they’re still out of work, or if they have a job that doesn’t pay enough to make the mortgage or pay the bills. So we’ve got more work to do. And that work is going to take some time. The problems that we developed didn’t happen overnight. We’re not going to solve them overnight either. But we will solve them.”

Perhaps the plea for more time has something to do with the 497 (and dwindling) days left before Americans pass their final judgment on the Obama-Biden administration’s stewardship of everything, including the new war in Libya.

Will it be Democrat Jimmy Carter redux? Or will it be the first time in nearly two centuries that Americans reelect three presidents in a row? …

David Harsanyi says people are saying crazy things about population. 

For years, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups have warned us that too many babies will destroy the Earth.

“We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet’s life-forms — an estimated 8,760 species die off per year — because, simply put,” explained environmentalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, “there are too many people.” (Well, not exactly that simple when one considers that millions of species had disappeared long before humans selfishly began drinking from plastic bottles.)

In one of his recent works of speculative fiction, The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman asked: “How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?” Dunno. Maybe we value reality? Perhaps we believe in the ability of humans to adapt and to innovate. Perhaps we’ve learned that Malthusian Chicken Littles slinging stories about the impending end of water or oil or natural resources are proved wrong so often that we ignore them.

Though, admittedly, it’s difficult to ignore the charismatic pseudoscience of Al Gore. …

Here’s the promised profile of Randy Barnett.

Over three decades, law professor Randy E. Barnett’s libertarian scholarship on the Constitution’s original meaning and the proper balance between federal and state power brought him respect within academia but little notice beyond.

That began to change in 2009, as the Georgetown University scholar made the case that Congress exceeded its power to regulate interstate commerce by including a requirement in the health care overhaul that everyone have insurance. Most constitutional scholars initially ridiculed Barnett’s argument against the individual mandate — that Congress cannot regulate or punish the “inactivity” of not buying something.

Few mock it anymore, now that two courts have adopted the same reasoning in ruling against the individual mandate’s constitutionality. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit will hear an appeal to one of those rulings this week in Atlanta.

In less than two years, Barnett, 59, has accomplished what few law professors ever manage to do: make an arcane constitutional argument so compelling and clear that it becomes part of the national conversation.

But what makes Barnett unique is how his influence has extended beyond the elite circle of litigators fighting the health care law and into the grass roots. He has helped members of the tea party movement and supporters on Capitol Hill formulate a proposed constitutional amendment that would authorize the repeal of laws enacted by Congress to which two-thirds of the states object. While its chances of being adopted are slight, that effort, and his work against the health care law, has made Barnett an intellectual favorite of House Republicans.

Still, Barnett feels no compunction about taking the GOP caucus to task when he believes its members have overstepped the proper bounds of federal power. In a recent newspaper opinion piece, Barnett accused House Republicans of “fair-weather federalism” for supporting a bill that would limit damages in medical malpractice lawsuits.

Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor who doesn’t agree with Barnett’s legal arguments, says his efforts have to be seen as part of a broader push by conservatives and libertarians to change the way the public thinks about federal power.

“They want the public and the courts to rethink the assumptions of the activist state that came with the New Deal,” Balkin wrote last year on his blog, “Balkinization.” “Randy and his allies are trying to change people’s minds through op-eds, speeches, protests and litigation. They are trying to move things from ‘off the wall’ to ‘on the wall.’” …

NY Times reports on the problem of trash in the satellite belt.

One of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of space-age litter orbiting Earth zipped uncomfortably close to the International Space Station on Tuesday.

The six crew members of the space station took refuge in their “lifeboats” — two Soyuz space capsules they would use to escape a crippled station — as the unidentified object hurtled past them at a speed of 29,000 miles per hour, missing the space station by only 1,100 feet. The episode took place at 8:08 a.m. Eastern time.

“We believe the probability that it would the hit the station was about 1 in 360,” said Lark Howorth, who leads the team at NASA that tracks the space station’s trajectory. NASA rules call for precautions when the risk of impact is greater than 1 in 10,000.

In the section of the station run by the United States, astronauts closed the hatches in case the debris — commonly known as space junk — crashed through, to limit the danger of explosive decompression. To prepare for a rapid departure, the clamps holding the Soyuz capsules to the station were released. …

James Delingpole says the science is settled, U. S. liberals are the “dumbest creatures on the planet.”

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

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When he got to Washington the president sent his kids to a private school, but called a halt to the successful DC voucher program that assisted poor blacks looking for a quality education for their children. The Washington Post had an editorial yesterday about the return of the program, courtesy of John Boehner. That one bit of hypocrisy by Obama is how Pickerhead knew for sure he is a fraud. The balance of today’s Pickings is devoted to the manifest shortcomings of the kid president.

MOST OF THE PARENTS who showed up Saturday to find out more about the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program could not care less about the politics or the polemics behind private school vouchers. What matters to them is arranging a decent education for their children. The excitement they brought to the task of choosing a good school for their sons and daughters should give pause to those who sought to deny them this opportunity.

D.C. parents, including many single mothers, streamed into the Renaissance Hotel for information about the federally funded program that this year will provide vouchers of up to $12,000 to children from low-income families to attend private schools. The scholarship program began in 2004 as part of a three-pronged approach to improve education in the District; additional resources also were funneled to traditional and charter public schools. When Democrats recaptured Congress, they barred the scholarship program from accepting new students, with the Obama administration a disappointing accomplice. The administration even rescinded scholarships that had been promised to 216 families in 2009. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), a strong supporter, used his clout to broker the program’s reauthorization as part of the deal to avert a federal shutdown.

Given the popularity of the program — evident in the hundreds of applicants as well as a recent Post poll showing more than two-thirds of D.C. residents (even higher numbers among African Americans) in support — there’s a strange disconnect in seeing such local leaders as Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) voice their opposition. They should hear Josette Hardy, her voice breaking, talk about wanting a better future — “including college” — for her 5-year-old daughter, Jamia. For Ms. Hardy, having lost out on lotteries for better-performing public schools, winning a scholarship is the only thing that will allow her daughter to escape the failing school in her Southeast neighborhood.

LaKia Smith, hoping to win a voucher for her 10-year-old son, said it best: “We should have as many choices as possible, not just the choices you choose to give us.”

Mark Steyn talks about the fiscal state of the union and how it won’t be cured by speeches.

The Democrats seem to have given up on budgets. Hey, who can blame them? They’ve got a ballpark figure: Let’s raise two trillion dollars in revenue every year, and then spend four trillion. That seems to work pretty well, so why get hung up on a lot of fine print? Harry Reid says the Senate has no plans to produce a budget, but in April the President did give a speech about “a new budget framework” that he said would save $4 trillion over the next 12 years.

That would be 2023, if you’re minded to take him seriously. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, did. Last week he asked Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, if he’d “estimated the budget impact of this framework.”

“No, Mr. Chairman,” replied Director Elmendorf, deadpan. “We don’t estimate speeches. We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech.”

“We don’t estimate speeches”: There’s an epitaph to chisel on the tombstone of the republic. Unfortunately for those of us on the receiving end, giving speeches is what Obama does. …

…The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along. Remember Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Florida? “I never thought this day would ever happen,” she gushed after an Obama rally in 2008. “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.” …

…In Realworld, political speeches would be about closing down unnecessary federal bureaucracies, dramatically downsizing or merging others, and ending make-work projects and mission creep. The culture of excess that distinguishes the hyperpower at twilight would be reviled at every turn. But instead the “highly persuasive” orator declares that there’s nothing to worry about that even more government can’t cure. In Speechworld, “no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.” In Realworld, that’s mainly because we’re going downhill. And the horizon is a cliff edge.

In the Weekly Standard, Yuval Levin discusses the budget battles and the latest CBO report.

…The Democratic Senate has not proposed a budget in either of the last two years. In February, President Obama offered a budget that would actually increase the deficit. Then in a speech in April he essentially retracted it, and offered in its place a vague and incoherent series of policy goals that left Democrats with no particular agenda. On June 23, at a hearing of the Budget Committee, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf was asked what his agency made of the proposals in that presidential address. “We don’t estimate speeches,” he said. “We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech.”

Republicans have no way to force the Democrats to be more specific and to take the crisis seriously. But they are doing their best to use the fight over raising the government’s debt ceiling—a fight the Democrats cannot avoid—to compel some responsible action.

Until last week, that fight had been focused on negotiations led by Vice President Biden. Those talks certainly revealed something about the Democrats’ priorities: In the midst of a spending-driven debt explosion and a weak economy, Democrats in Washington want to raise taxes. But the negotiations also revealed the continuing unwillingness of the president to make specific proposals about how to reduce spending, reform entitlements, and bring the debt under control. On June 23, House majority leader Eric Cantor (who had represented House Republicans at the negotiations) decided he’d had enough, and left the talks in order to force the issue to a higher level and compel the president to get specific. …

In the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Colin McNickle looks at several examples of the administration’s economic ignorance.

…Gasoline prices have been falling. Supplies have been and are expected to be relatively stable. And the Obama administration taps the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves, designed to offset serious supply disruptions. That 30 million barrels — and 30 million more from the reserves of more than two dozen member countries of the International Energy Agency — will be dribbled into the supply chain over the next month.

The net positive economic effect? Pretty negligible. But the net negative effect of what really is a political stunt designed to slap what looks like a rich veneer onto a particle board economic record — could be lasting. The New York Times reports that the move was intended, in part, to send a message to market traders “that governments would react when they believed there was excessive speculation in oil markets.”

That would be those evil speculators whose work, in reality, promotes price stability.

As Fox Business News host John Stossel reminded in a column last month, “When (speculators) foresee a future oil shortage — that is, when prices are lower than anticipated in the future — speculators buy lots of it, store it and then sell it when the shortage hits. They know they can charge more when there’s relatively little oil on the market. But their selling during the shortage brings prices down from what they would have been had speculators not acted.”

And this Mr. Obama wants to stop? …

Bloomberg columnist, William Cohan, writes on the administration’s treatment of Wall Street.

As we head into the 2012 presidential election cycle, the new, official Obama administration policy on Wall Street is crystalline: Hands off the bad guys. …

… The continuing free passes are immensely frustrating, especially when the evidence continues to pile up that lots of people at these firms knew very well as 2007 progressed that they were packaging lousy mortgages and selling them at par to investors. For instance, the SEC’s complaint against JPMorgan included an e-mail sent on Feb. 13, 2007, by a “salesperson” in JPMorgan’s investment bank who was working with Magnetar Capital, the hedge fund looking to short Squared, the synthetic CDO in question. “We all know,” the salesperson wrote, that Magnetar “wants to print as many deals as possible before everything completely falls apart.”

As the market began to crack, JPMorgan pushed potential investors very hard to buy Squared. On March 19, one employee wrote to the European sales force that “we really need your help on this one. This is a top priority from the top of the bank all the way down.” Three days later, another member of the deal team tried again to get the sales team hyped. “We are soooo pregnant with this deal, we need a wheel-barrel to move around,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Let’s schedule the cesarian, please!”

Needless to say, similar e-mails have been found in the files of bankers and traders along Wall Street and at the credit rating services, such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. Are we really expected to believe that such widespread questionable practices flourished without any of the corner-office folk knowing about it?

Make no mistake, Sheila Bair: those “higher up” on Wall Street knew very well what their firms were doing and simply chose to ignore it. After all, there was money to be made. (JPMorgan got paid $18.9 million to slap together Squared, and Goldman got paid $15 million for Abacus.) If that isn’t enough to make you lose your lunch — although not, of course, a $35,800 dinner — then the fact that Wall Street is going to get away with it all surely will.

Michael Barone thinks there’s a better comparison to Obama than Jimmy Carter. Barone points to Chauncey Gardiner, Peter Sellers’ character in the movie “Being There.”

…But there is another comparison I think more appropriate for a president who, according to one of his foreign-policy staffers, prefers to “lead from behind.” The man I have in mind is Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie “Being There.”

As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well in the garden.” “First comes the spring and summer,” he explains, “but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.” The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, “There will be growth in the spring.”

Kind of reminds you of Obama’s approach to the federal budget, doesn’t it?

In preparing his February budget, Obama totally ignored the recommendations of his own fiscal commission headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Others noticed: The Senate rejected the initial budget by a vote of 97-0.

Then, speaking in April at George Washington University, Obama said he was presenting a new budget with $4 trillion in long-term spending cuts. But there were no specifics. …

Michael Ledeen comments on some embarrassing presidential gaffes that would have greatly amused the Liberal Media if they’d been W’s.

Big Media doesn’t pay much attention to them, even though Obama makes an amazing number of errors in his public statements.  And I think it’s easy enough to understand why the BM largely ignores them:  to report them all would totally undermine the image of the president to which a surprising number of “reporters” and pundits are wedded:  that of an unusually intelligent and well educated man.

Yet someone who tells a crowd in Vienna that his “Austrian” isn’t very good, who tells Marines that he’s pleased to speak to the “Marine Corpse,” and who, just today, said he’d given the Medal of Honor to a survivor from the 10th Mountain Division, when in fact the award was given posthumously, doesn’t fit my definition of a brilliant and cultured man.

…And these people think they’re the smart guys, and we’re the dummies, even though we know that German is spoken in Vienna, and many of us would be mortified to make a glaring error about an American hero.

The gaffes are important.  They tell us a lot about the nature of our leaders, and it’s not good news.  But it is news…even though it’s not reported as often as it should be, or with the sort of concern the gaffes deserve.

Toby Harnden has more thoughts on Obama confusing two Medal of Honor recipients, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.

…The Medal of Honor is the highest United States award for valour. It’s the equivalent of the Victoria Cross. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, just eight have been awarded. Three of them have been awarded by Obama. The names of recipients are seared on the hearts of many, many Americans.

To mix up SSG Giunta and SFC Monti was just awful and it suggests a relaxed attitude towards American heroes that has been evident on previous occasions. Note that rather than referring to SFC Monti by his rank, Obama said just “Jared Monti”. Servicemen and women earn their ranks and deserve to be addressed by them. …

…All this suggests that Obama doesn’t really understand or fully appreciate the military, its culture and its traditions. I don’t think for a moment that he deliberately wants to disrespect Medal of Honor winners or American troops. It doesn’t mean he’s stupid. But sometimes being casual about something solemn and serious does amount to disrespect. A good first step towards putting this right would be to apologise to the family of SFC Monti and to SSG Guinta.

UPDATE: According to ABC: “On his Facebook page this evening, Monti’s father, Paul, posted: “FYI- President Barack Obama telephoned me personally this afternoon to apologise for his error in his speech to the 10th mountain division re: Jared’s medal ceremony. Apology accepted.”

Pundit and Pundette comment on the First Lady’s inappropriate attire at a posthumous Medal of Honor ceremony.

You might think a posthumous Medal of Honor award ceremony would be a somber occasion, but not everyone would agree with you. Either this is an especially skillful photo shop effort or Michelle Obama has no clue whatsoever about the nature of this event. U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Jared C. Monti’s parents received the award for him. I hope they didn’t notice the first lady’s stunningly inappropriate dress, but that’s unlikely.

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Randy Barnett, law prof at Georgetown, who will be profiled in Thursday’s Pickings has a Volokh post today on the organized campaign against Supreme Court justices.

It has been clear for some time now that activists have moved from impugning the character of conservative Supreme Court nominees to delegitimating them as sitting justices. Curt Levey has an interesting article describing these tactics and the possible motives of the attackers: Ganging Up on Justices Thomas, Scalia, and Alito. Here is how the article begins:

“President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address featured an unprecedented scolding of the conservative Supreme Court justices, seated before him, for their Citizens United campaign finance ruling. It signaled a dangerous escalation in the left’s politicization of the courts and “set the tone,” says Politico, for this year’s “aggressive — and, at times, personal — attack on the… impartiality and ethics of Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and, to a lesser extent, Samuel Alito.”

The attack is being led by left-wing activist groups, talking heads, and a group of liberal congressmen. It is born of unhappiness about the Court’s recent and prospective decisions impacting the Obama agenda, as well as paranoia about a corporate cash-fueled, vast right-wing conspiracy headed by the Koch brothers. And it is maintained by cobbling together tenuous suggestions of conflicts and misconduct involving Scalia, Thomas, and Alito in the hopes of creating an ethical cloud. …”

Didn’t think Liberals could fight any dirtier? Curt Levey writes about the attacks against conservative Supreme Court Justices, in the American Spectator.

…liberals hope their attacks on the conservative justices will ensure that the justices are intimidated and the public is suspicious when the most controversial aspects of Obama’s agenda — Obamacare, the attack on Arizona’s illegal immigration crackdown, and the EPA’s attempted end-run around congressional resistance to cap and trade — reach the Supreme Court.

…The bottom line is that the Supreme Court’s vote on the constitutionality of Obamacare is likely to be very close, so liberals need Kagan’s vote and will fight hard against any pressure for her recusal. Are the attacks on the conservative justices the beginning of that fight? Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey thinks so:

“The purpose of this isn’t really to pressure Thomas into a recusal, at which Thomas is almost certain to issue his trademark booming laugh, but to pre-empt the recusal argument for Elena Kagan.”

…TO BE FULLY understood, the ethics attacks must be seen in a historical context. It is said that “Liars think everyone lies, and thieves think everyone steals.” Thus, it should come as no surprise that the ethics allegations — essentially, charges that the conservative justices are beholden to political interests — comes on the heels of the left’s decades-long endeavor to politicize the courts. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors criticize Secretary Geithner for wanting to pay for the federal spending spree by increasing taxes on small businesses.

The secretary of the Treasury says taxes must be raised on small business so the federal government can stay big. With that breathtaking statement, he helpfully mapped out the key difference between the parties.

…”If you don’t touch revenues,” Geithner said, “you have to shrink the overall size of government programs”…

Even more appalling is the fact Geithner didn’t back off his position when Ellmers told him that 64% of new jobs in this country are created by small businesses. In fact, he acknowledged that she is correct. …

In the WSJ, Stephen Moore looks at the recovery that isn’t.

…In a report entitled “Unchartered Depths,” the Committee finds that “employment is now 5.0% below what it was at the start of the recession, 38 months ago. This compares to an average rise in employment of 3.7% over the same period in prior post-WWII recessions.”

On economic growth, real GDP has risen 0.8% over the 13 quarters since the recession began, compared to an average increase of 9.9% in past recoveries. From the beginning of the recession to April 2011, real personal income has grown just .9% compared to 9.4% for the same period in previous post 1960 recessions.

The standard response from Obama apologists is that recession of 2008 and 2009 was different because, as former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro puts it, “this was a financial crisis, and these take longer to recover from.” In fact, in most cases, the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery to make up for lost ground. …

Victor Davis Hanson looks at the massive wealth redistribution program called the Department of Agriculture.

The Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline to millions of struggling homestead farmers. Instead it is a vast, self-perpetuating, postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion — a sum far greater than the nation’s net farm income this year.

In fact, the more the Agriculture Department has pontificated about family farmers, the more they have vanished — comprising now only about 1% of the American population.

Net farm income is expected in 2011 to reach its highest levels in more than three decades, as a rapidly growing and food-short world increasingly looks to the U.S. to provide it everything from soybeans and wheat to beef and fruit. Somebody should explain that good news to the Department of Agriculture: This year it will give a record $20 billion in various crop “supports” to the nation’s wealthiest farmers — with the richest 10% receiving over 70% of all the redistributive payouts. If farmers on their own are making handsome profits, why, with a $1.6 trillion annual federal deficit, is the Department of Agriculture borrowing unprecedented amounts to subsidize them? …

Joel Kotkin notes the growth of the Gulf Region.

For most of the nation’s history, the Atlantic region — primarily New York City — has dominated the nation’s trade. In the last few decades of the 20th Century, the Pacific, led by Los Angeles and Long Beach, gained prominence. Now we may be about to see the ascendancy of a third coast: the Gulf, led primarily by Houston but including New Orleans and a host of smaller ports across the regions.

The 600,000 square mile Gulf region has long been derided for its humid climate, conservative political traditions and vulnerability to natural disasters. Yet despite these factors, the Gulf is destined to emerge as the most economically vibrant of our three coasts. In Forbes’ rankings of the fastest-growing job markets in the country, six Gulf cities made the top 50: Houston, Corpus Christi and Brownsville, in Texas; New Orleans; and Gulfport-Biloxi and Pascagoula, in Mississippi. In contrast, just one Pacific port, Anchorage, Alaska, and one small Atlantic port, Portsmouth, N.H., made the cut.

This reflects a long-term shift of money, power and jobs away from both the North Atlantic and the Pacific to the cities of the Gulf. The Port of Houston, for example, enjoyed a 28.1% jump in foreign trade this year, and trade at Louisiana’s main ports also reached records levels.

This growth stems from a host of factors ranging from politics, demographics and energy to emerging trade patterns and new technologies. One potential game-changer is the scheduled 2014 $5.25 billion widening of the Panama Canal, which will allow the passage to accommodate ships carrying twice as much cargo as they are able to carry currently. …

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Der Spiegel reporter tells us the story of the guards for ships that sail through pirate-plagued waters – the Horn of Africa.

While the European naval mission Atalanta avoids definitive contact with the pirates who plague the waters around the Horn of Africa, shipping companies are protecting their vessels with armed private security personnel. SPIEGEL joined one such ship as it ran the pirate gauntlet on the world’s most important trade route.

A cardboard carton the size of a shoebox bobs about in the Red Sea waves. As James Roles observes it through a telescope, a shot rings out. “Not bad,” he says, “but you’re a little bit short. Go ahead and aim it a little higher. 

Kevin McGregor sets his rifle’s telescopic sights on the box and pulls the trigger once again. Roles is satisfied. It’s a hit. He’s ready.

Roles and his British team arrived onboard two days ago. The GasChem Antarctic had just left the Suez Canal when a motorboat approached the ship carrying the men. They are four ex-Royal Marines who now work for the British security company Neptune Maritime Security. The men were sporting military-style close-cropped haircuts, wearing Bermuda shorts and polo shirts, and carrying large, black bags as they climbed the ladder onto the ship.

Roles and his colleagues fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Now their task is to protect the GasChem Antarctic on behalf of Hartmann, a shipping company based in Leer, in northwestern Germany. The gas tanker unloaded ethylene in Spain and is now en route to the United Arab Emirates, where it will be loaded up again with gas to deliver to Argentina. …

…Roles and his team load the magazines of their two semiautomatic weapons. They are 7.62 mm caliber, like the pirates’ AK-47s, but the British security forces use a more powerful propellant. “If you hit a shoulder, that’s an arm gone,” Roles comments dryly. Three shots are enough to sink a skiff, and they have 600 rounds. Merchant ships and pirates sometimes trade fire for several hours. The men unpack helmets and bulletproof vests reinforced with steel plates.

…McGregor retrieves the morphine that the captain keeps under lock and key. “If there are any injuries,” he says, “it will be on the bridge.” Pirates sometimes fire anti-tank missiles and AK-47 volleys at the bridge, and in some cases, the ship looks like a sieve by the time they’re finished. “This is war,” Köhler says.

It’s an absurd war, one in which a few Somalis in flip-flops and tiny boats manage to put to shame modern warships from the most powerful countries in the world. On his last voyage, Köhler’s ship was pursued by a pirate boat. The captain accelerated, sprayed water from the fire hoses and held up a homemade wooden weapon that looked like an AK-47 from afar. The pirates turned back. …

The legal rationale for Obama’s Libyan adventure gets a once over from Charles Krauthammer.

Is the Libya war legal? Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, it is not. President Obama has exceeded the 90-day period to receive retroactive authorization from Congress.

But things are not so simple. No president should accept — and no president from Nixon on has accepted — the constitutionality of the WPR, passed unilaterally by Congress over a presidential veto. On the other hand, every president should have the constitutional decency to get some congressional approval when he takes the country to war.

The model for such constitutional restraint is — yes, Sen. Obama — George W. Bush. Not once but twice (Afghanistan and then Iraq) did Bush seek and receive congressional authorization, as his father did for the Persian Gulf War. On Libya, Obama did nothing of the sort. He claimed exemption from the WPR on the grounds that America in Libya is not really engaged in “hostilities.”

To deploy an excuse so transparently ridiculous isn’t just a show of contempt for Congress and for the intelligence of the American people. It manages additionally to undermine the presidency’s own war-making prerogatives by implicitly conceding that if the Libya war really did involve hostilities, the president would indeed be subject to the WPR.

The worst of all possible worlds: Insult Congress, weaken the presidency. A neat trick.

But the question of war-making power is larger than one president’s blundering. We have a core constitutional problem. In balancing war-making power between Congress and the presidency, the Constitution grants Congress the exclusive right to declare war.

Problem is: No one declares war anymore….

In WaPo, Ruth Marcus comments on Obama going against convention to do what he wants regarding Libya.

…As The New York Times first reported, the administration jettisoned the ordinary process by which the executive branch determines the legality of its own actions. Normally, that decision would be made by the OLC after considering the views of other departments. The president has the undisputed power to overrule OLC, but that is an extremely rare occurrence.

Having the imprimatur of the OLC is the constitutional equivalent of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. For example, before the administration launched military operations in Libya, it obtained an OLC ruling that the president did not need to obtain prior congressional approval. The White House was happy to brandish the opinion to rebut any question about its authority.

In the current episode, the White House appears to have chosen to avoid a formal opinion — one that it knew it wasn’t going to like. The question involves the applicability of a provision of the War Powers Resolution that requires the president to terminate military operations within 90 days of commencing hostilities unless it obtains congressional approval. …

The WSJ editors do some extensive myth-busting about fracking. This will be an important battleground. The left can’t abide this procedure which well help us with abundant and inexpensive energy. They prefer we be weak and dependent on others.

…Most drilling operations—including fracking—have long been regulated by the states. Operators need permits to drill and are subject to inspections and reporting requirements. Many resource-rich states like Texas have detailed fracking rules, while states newer to drilling are developing these regulations.

As a regulatory model, consider Pennsylvania. Recently departed Governor Ed Rendell is a Democrat, and as the shale boom progressed he worked with industry and regulators to develop a flexible regulatory environment that could keep pace with a rapidly growing industry. As questions arose about well casings, for instance, Pennsylvania imposed new casing and performance requirements. The state has also increased fees for processing shale permits, which has allowed it to hire more inspectors and permitting staff.

…Amid this political scrutiny, the industry will have to take great drilling care while better making its public case. In this age of saturation media, a single serious example of water contamination could lead to a political panic that would jeopardize tens of billions of dollars of investment. The industry needs to establish best practices and blow the whistle on drillers that dodge the rules.

The question for the rest of us is whether we are serious about domestic energy production. All forms of energy have risks and environmental costs, not least wind (noise and dead birds and bats) and solar (vast expanses of land). Yet renewables are nowhere close to supplying enough energy, even with large subsidies, to maintain America’s standard of living. The shale gas and oil boom is the result of U.S. business innovation and risk-taking. …

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In discussing the president’s political motives for the early troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, Peter Wehner shares a good story about W.

…I have the advantage of having served a president during wartime. And whatever faults one might be tempted to lay at the feet of George W. Bush, he never allowed politics of the Obama kind to infect his decisions. I know of what I speak. In September 2006, with the midterm elections approaching and the war of Iraq floundering, Senator Mitch McConnell, then the Republic whip, asked to see the president alone in the Oval Office. “Mr. President,” McConnell said, “your unpopularity is going to cost us control of Congress.” When President Bush asked McConnell what to do about it, McConnell said, “Bring some troops home from Iraq.”

Four months later, Senator McConnell got his reply. President Bush – who faced far more ferocious political opposition to the war than Obama ever has – not only did not withdraw troops; he increased them while embracing a strategy that came to be known as the “surge.” And he blocked every attempt at a premature withdrawal.  

There are many factors that explain why the Iraq war turned around, but the fortitude of President Bush surely ranks high among them. That quality looked impressive then; it looks even more impressive now.

Max Boot discusses what will be lost if the president continues with the early troop withdrawal, in Contentions.

…During the past half year our troops had taken back large portions of Helmand and Kandahar provinces from the Taliban. They are now holding that ground against determined Taliban counterattacks. But this is only stage one of a well-thought-out campaign plan designed by Gen. David Petraeus. Stage two calls for extending the security bubble to Regional Command-East–to the treacherous, mountainous terrain where the Haqqani Network, the Taliban, and the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin have their strongholds. By electing to pull out 10,000 surge troops this year and 20,000 more by next summer, Obama is making it virtually impossible to implement this campaign plan. He is even throwing into doubt our ability to consolidate gains in the south.

…As usual Obama said nothing about seeking victory in Afghanistan over the Haqqanis, the Taliban, or other extremist groups closely allied with Al Qaeda. Instead he spoke above all of his desire to get out of Afghanistan. “This is the beginning — but not the end –- of our effort to wind down this war,” he said.

That is all our enemies need to hear. They will now be convinced that we do not have the will to see the war through and will act accordingly. …

Jennifer Rubin highlights important points made by Robert Kagan.

…”The entire military leadership believes the president’s decision is a mistake, and especially the decision to withdraw the remainder of the surge forces by September 2012. They will soldier on and do their best, but as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, put it, in characteristic understatement, they believe the decision will increase the risk to the troops and increase the chance that the mission will not succeed. It bears repeating that the deadline imposed by the president has nothing to do with military or strategic calculation. It has everything to do with an electoral calculation. President Obama wants those troops out two months before Americans go to the voting booth.

This may prove a disastrous political calculation, too, however. If the war is going badly in the summer and fall of 2012, it will be because of the decision the president made this week. Everyone will know he did it against the advice of his commanders. Everyone will know he did it for political reasons. So if the war is going badly a year from now, whom do you think the American people will blame? There will still be 70,000 American troops in Afghanistan, but as part of a losing effort. Will Americans reward Obama at the polls under those circumstances?”

Put differently, it is one thing to bring up your foreign policy and national security credentials in a campaign (or the other guy’s shortcomings) and quite another to let an election drive war policy. …

In the National Review, Rich Lowry adds his criticism.

…Gen. Douglas MacArthur was wrong. There is a substitute for victory. It’s “ending wars responsibly.”…

…A cruder, more simplistic president from a bygone era might have couched the war in terms of our effort to win. For Obama, the paramount goal is ending, not winning. But ending “responsibly” — which in the case of Afghanistan may mean ending with enough of an interval of relative stability that our exit doesn’t seem an obvious defeat.

…Obama cited the cost of the war and the need to “live within our means.” Only when it comes to the Afghan War is the president interested in fiscal retrenchment. Whatever the incremental savings of a swifter drawdown of the surge than our military commanders recommend, it will be a blip compared with our $1.4 trillion annual deficit. The path to national solvency does not run through the Hindu Kush. …

Roger Simon wonders what is wrong with Democrats.

…I used to be a Democrat — for decades. Was it always this bad? Was I that blind?

…Why can’t these people wake up? Don’t they have children, grandchildren? Don’t they realize we are going broke? The evidence is everywhere — from Michigan to Madrid. Keynesian economics — the welfare state itself — has become completely inoperative, morphed into a Ponzi scheme by an aging population.

… Why is it that, in these times, there is nothing less liberal than a “liberal,” less progressive than a “progressive”? …

…I think there are three things at work — habit, fear of change, and pure, unbridled, screw-the-rest-of-us, self-interest. …

In Forbes, Paul Roderick Gregory looks at recent airlines’ bankruptcies versus the Union Bailout at GM.

…The White House estimates an eventual $14 billion price tag for the GM and Chrysler bailouts. What has the $14 billion bought us? It certainly hasn’t saved millions of jobs–more like 4,000, and probably fewer. If we dig deeper, we find that most of the taxpayer money went to protecting members of the United Auto Workers.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructures insolvent companies with the aim of allowing them to emerge as viable concerns. It corrects past errors and is a vital link that makes market capitalism work. If we now have the federal government rather than an impartial bankruptcy judge leading this process, capitalism has lost.

Government intervention is a terrible precedent because it fosters corruption and political favoritism. It allows the current government to reward contributors to its political campaigns and, perhaps more significantly, to scare others into costly political activities. All of this lowers the productivity of the economy and makes all of us poorer. If GM becomes the precedent, we are headed toward third world status and a loss of rule of law.

Bret Jacobson, in the NY Post, discusses how the Obama administration is increasing union power through the NLRB.

…But the Obama NLRB has clearly signaled that it puts the interests of Big Labor ahead of everything else, including its proper role as neutral enforcer of the nation’s labor laws. Examples from just this year:

* The board is pushing to give unions the right to enter a workplace even if their intent is to harass customers and employees. The NLRB says companies shouldn’t be allowed to treat union officials any differently than they do charitable organizations they let on their premises, such as the Girl Scouts or the Red Cross.

…* The NLRB is also pushing to let unions cherry-pick groups of workers within a company to organize, without giving those who oppose the union the opportunity to vote, changing an established definition of a “bargaining unit” that has been in place for more than 50 years. The result would be a costly, chaotic mess for businesses trying to juggle multiple unions and different sets of work rules, benefits and wage rates.

* The board is now pushing through rules that eliminate key checks and balances from the process by which a workplace can be unionized — in the name of speeding things up, it’s upending decades of precedent to make it easier for unions to force themselves on workers, who will have less information. …

In Market Watch, Bret Arends dispels the myth that quantitative easing has done any good.

…The flood of cheap money has helped the big banks rake in profits hand over fist. (Last quarter, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE:GS)  made trading profits every single day.) Commodity speculators have grown rich. And the stock market has boomed, at least when measured in paper dollars. Since Ben Bernanke unveiled QE2 last August, the S&P 500 Index (SNC:SPX)  has jumped about 24%.

…But the latest analysis weakens still further the claims that QE2 has helped the economy substantially.

Even before Tuesday’s grim news on home sales, we already knew that the housing market was actually worse now than it was before QE2 was launched. We already knew inflation and unemployment were higher today than they were then. We already knew economic growth is slower.

The kicker? Even the so-called boom on the stock market has been as much illusion as anything else, caused by the devaluation of the paper dollar. If you measure the stock market in a hard currency, there hasn’t been much boom at all. Indeed, the turmoil of the last few weeks means the S&P 500 is now less than 2% higher, when measured in Swiss francs, than as it was on Aug. 27, when Bernanke first unveiled his big idea. …

In Forbes, Rich Danker explains that, for everyone getting a government paycheck, the economy’s going great.

The stimulus program didn’t work, a fact even President Obama acknowledged late last year when he admitted to the New York Times that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” But it did succeed in remaking Washington, D.C., into a boomtown as the rest of the country struggles. With a relatively low unemployment rate (6%) and rising home values, the area has turned into a poster-child for Keynesian economics and liberal sensibility.

The Economist reports that federal employment in Washington rose by 20,000 jobs through the recession. This refers to only a portion of the metro area’s workforce — 13% — that works directly for the federal government. Contractors, consultants, vendors and support services round out the modern government-industrial complex. President Obama’s push to turn legions of the contractors into “feds” will further solidify the job security in this pool of workers. D.C. and its environs, which created 6% of the nation’s job growth in the past year despite having just 2% of the country’s population, is now a one-way bet for strong economic growth thanks to a concentrated effort of federal spending and intervention in the economy.

Despite some commentators who have taken to celebrating the city’s newfound cultural diversity, the truth is that D.C. got this way by becoming more like itself: a government town. The Economist again: “The government added workers to oversee intervention in the financial-services and car industries, and financial-regulatory agencies have continued to add staff since. Washington has frequently grown stronger in the wake of economic calamity, often because of public demand for more market oversight.”…

Karl Rove has an interesting analysis of Obama’s likely demise in 2012.

…The last president re-elected with unemployment over 7.2% was FDR in 1936. Ronald Reagan overcame 7.2% unemployment because the rate was dropping dramatically (it had been over 10%) as the economy grew very rapidly in 1983 and 1984. Today, in contrast, the Federal Reserve says growth will be less than 3% this year and less than 3.8% next year, with unemployment between 7.8% and 8.2% by Election Day.

…There’s more. Approval among younger voters has dropped 22 points, and it’s dropped 20 points among Latinos. Even African-American voters are less excited about Mr. Obama than they were—and than he needs them to be. For example, if their share of the turnout drops just one point in North Carolina, Mr. Obama’s 2008 winning margin there is wiped out two and a half times over.

While many voters still personally like Mr. Obama, they deeply oppose his policies, and he tends to be weakest on issues voters consider most important. In the June 13 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 56% disapprove of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy. Fifty-nine percent in the Economist/YouGov poll of June 14 disapprove of how he’s dealt with the deficit.

…Finally, Mr. Obama has made a strategic blunder. While he needs to raise money and organize, he decided to be a candidate this year rather than president. He has thus unnecessarily abandoned one of incumbency’s great strengths, which is the opportunity to govern and distance himself from partisan politics until next spring. Instead, Team Obama has attacked potential GOP opponents and slandered Republican proposals with abandon. This is not what the public is looking for from the former apostle of hope and change. … 

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Think the job situation is bad? You don’t know the half of it, according to Mort Zuckerman who perhaps won’t vote for Obama the next time around.

The Great Recession has now earned the dubious right of being compared to the Great Depression. In the face of the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policies in our history, we have experienced the loss of over 7 million jobs, wiping out every job gained since the year 2000. From the moment the Obama administration came into office, there have been no net increases in full-time jobs, only in part-time jobs. This is contrary to all previous recessions. Employers are not recalling the workers they laid off from full-time employment.

The real job losses are greater than the estimate of 7.5 million. They are closer to 10.5 million, as 3 million people have stopped looking for work. Equally troublesome is the lower labor participation rate; some 5 million jobs have vanished from manufacturing, long America’s greatest strength. Just think: Total payrolls today amount to 131 million, but this figure is lower than it was at the beginning of the year 2000, even though our population has grown by nearly 30 million. …

… Today, over 14 million people are unemployed. We now have more idle men and women than at any time since the Great Depression. Nearly seven people in the labor pool compete for every job opening. Hiring announcements have plunged to 10,248 in May, down from 59,648 in April. Hiring is now 17 percent lower than the lowest level in the 2001-02 downturn. One fifth of all men of prime working age are not getting up and going to work. Equally disturbing is that the number of people unemployed for six months or longer grew 361,000 to 6.2 million, increasing their share of the unemployed to 45.1 percent. We face the specter that long-term unemployment is becoming structural and not just cyclical, raising the risk that the jobless will lose their skills and become permanently unemployable. …

But, Peter Wehner says the president is proud of his record.

… Obama went on to say, “I’m extraordinarily proud of the economic record that we were able to produce over the first two and a half years.”

I wonder why. The president has presided over an economy that has lost 2.5 million jobs since he was sworn in and has created only 600,000 jobs during the two years since the recovery began (the summer of 2009). The unemployment rate is up 25 percent since Obama took office and has been above 8 percent for almost 30 months (after the Obama administration promised it would not exceed 8 percent if his stimulus package was passed in early 2009). The debt has increased 35 percent during the Obama presidency. Gas prices have more than doubled. The housing crisis has recently entered a double dip and is now worse than the Great Depression. For the nine economic quarters Obama has been in office, real annual growth in GDP has been just 1.5 percent, just barely above  what it was during the decade of the Great Depression (1.3 percent). And chronic unemployment is worse than the Great Depression.

If Obama is extraordinarily proud of his economic record, he may be the only one.

OK, Pickerhead did not need to make the remark about Zuckerman voting for Obama. After all, the other choice was Yosemite Sam. To illustrate how lucky the GOP was to dodge the bullet of a President McCain, this weekend he was railing against “Republican isolationists”. David Harsanyi has the story. 

There’s been a lot of talk about an alleged turn in American public opinion — particularly among Republicans — toward “isolationism.”

In a recent debate among GOP presidential hopefuls, there was some discussion about ending the United States’ commitment to the tribal warlords and medieval shamans of the Afghan wilderness. This induced John McCain to complain about the rise of a new “strain of isolationism” that hearkens back to “Pat Buchanan-style Republicanism.”

McCain sidekick Lindsey Graham went on to notify Congress that it “should sort of shut up and not empower Gadhafi” when the topic of the House’s potentially defunding the military — er, kinetic, non-warlike bombing activity over Libya — came up. It would be a mistake, he vented, for Republican candidates to sit “to the left” of President Barack Obama on national security.

So if you don’t shut up and stop carping about this non-war war of ours, you are abetting North African strongmen. Makes sense. It’s the return of Teddy Roosevelt-style Republicanism, in which arbitrary power (and John McCain’s singular wisdom) matters a lot more than any democratic institution. …

More from Tony Blankley. 

… I supported both the Afghan and Iraq wars (as did Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Romney and most other GOP candidates) as necessary responses to the rising threat from radical Islam after Sept. 11, 2001. I continue to support the still likely winning effort in Iraq and have written on that in this space recently.

But almost two years ago, I was one of the first GOP internationalist-oriented commentators or politicians to conclude that the Afghan war effort had served its initial purpose, but it was time to phase out the war. As a punitive raid against the regime that gave succor to Osama bin Laden, we removed the Taliban government and killed as many al Qaeda and Taliban as possible.

But as the purpose of that war turned into nation-building, even GOP internationalists have a duty to reassess whether, given the resources and strategy, such policy is likely to be effective (see about a dozen of my columns on Afghan war policy from 2009-10).

Now many others in the GOP and in the non-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party are likewise judging failure in Afghanistan to be almost inevitable. …

We enjoy much of Slate. A blogger at Democracy in America takes exception to a piece on libertarians that trashed Hayek and Von Mises.

… Mr Metcalf clearly means to suggest that Mises depended on subsidies from the simpatico rich because the quality of his work failed to qualify him for a legitimate professorship. But this is ridiculous to anyone who has bothered to read any of the man’s scholarly work. To fair-minded, curious liberals I would recommend Mises’ 1929 book Liberalism (free online), which makes a powerful case for a cosmopolitan, internationalist politics of free people, free movement, free trade, and peace against the grain of its era’s calamitous trend of truculent racialist nationalism. It remains a relevant and inspiring work. You certainly don’t have to agree with everything Mises argues to see that he was one of the good guys. 

As for Hayek, his post at the London School of Economics, from which he famously debated Keynes and cemented his reputation in the world of “polite discourse”, did not involve corporate sponsorship, as far as I know. Maybe Mr Metcalf is troubled by Henry Hutchinson’s £20,000 gift to the Fabian Society, which got the school off the ground, or subsequent gifts by the fledgling school’s other moderately socialist donors? In any case, if the LSE or the University of Chicago’s Committee for Social Thought survived, like art museums and symphony orchestras, by the good graces of wealthy benefactors, it’s hard to see what this has to do with the quality the work Hayek produced while in the employ of these august institutions. If Mr Metcalf knows anything about the suspicious corporate largesse supporting Hayek at the Universities of Freiburg and Salzburg in 1960s and 70s, I’m keen to hear about it. …

Now for a treat, we stop spending time on the shabby people in Washington and look at things we have been learning about humans and their lives 5,000 years ago. We allude to Iceman and the continuing discoveries about him. The story is in Science Now.

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA—Less than 2 hours before he hiked his last steps in the Tyrolean Alps 5000 years ago, Ötzi the Iceman fueled up on a last meal of ibex meat. That was the conclusion of a talk here last week at the 7th World Congress on Mummy Studies, during which researchers—armed with Ötzi’s newly sequenced genome and a detailed dental analysis—also concluded that the Iceman had brown eyes and probably wasn’t much of a tooth brusher.

The Iceman, discovered in the Italian Alps in 1991 some 5200 years after his death, has been a gold mine of information about Neolithic life, as researchers have extensively studied his gear—copper ax, hide and leather clothing, and accessories—and his body. Previous research on the Iceman’s meals focused on fecal material removed from his bowels. The contents showed that he dined on red deer meat and possibly cereal some 4 hours before his death.

But a team led by microbiologist Frank Maixner of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, recently reexamined computed tomography scans taken in 2005 and spotted, for the first time, the Iceman’s stomach. As the researchers reported at the meeting, the organ had moved upward to an unusual position, and it looked full. When they took a sample of the stomach contents and sequenced the DNA of the animal fibers they found, they discovered that Ötzi, just 30 to 120 minutes before his death, had dined on the meat of an Alpine ibex, an animal that frequents high elevations and whose body parts were once thought to possess medicinal qualities. …

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about Iceman was the fact that 18 different types of wood were found with him. All of them the perfect application for the intended use.

… The axe was the first piece of the Iceman’s equipment to be discovered. The haft of the axe is make of yew wood. Almost three-quarters of the blade are embedded in the shafting fork, held in place with birch pitch. The blade is 9.3 cm long, trapeziform in shape, and made of almost pure copper.

A completely preserved 1.82 m long bow-stave made of yew wood is the largest piece of equipment discovered. The Iceman’s bow is clearly an unfinished piece and not yet functional, showing signs of his work in progress.

The Iceman’s completely preserved quiver was discovered on a stone slab about 15 feet from the corpse. It was composed of a rectangular chamois hide bag. The piece of hide was seamed together lengthways and along the lower narrow side.

The quiver contained two arrows that were ready to shoot and twelve rough shafts make of shoots of hard viburnum sapwood. The heads of the arrows are made of sharpened flint, and had been glued with birch tar and bound on using string. The quiver also contained tips of four stag antlers that were tied together with strips of bast. A bent antler point was probably used by the Iceman to skin and gut animals.

The flint dagger, measuring approximately 13.2 cm, was discovered near the mummy. The dagger has a small triangular flint blade, the handle was made of ash, and a string was attached to a notch at the end of the handle. The sheath-like scabbard is made of knotted lime wood bast. It is presumed that a leather eye on the side allowed the sheath to be attached to the Iceman’s belt. …

Adding to the things we are learning about our ancestors, a 13,000 year old bone was found in Vero Beach, FL on which was carved a surprising image. Science Codex has the story.

Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Florida have announced the discovery of a bone fragment, approximately 13,000 years old, in Florida with an incised image of a mammoth or mastodon. This engraving is the oldest and only known example of Ice Age art to depict a proboscidean (the order of animals with trunks) in the Americas. The team’s research is published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The bone was discovered in Vero Beach, Fla. by James Kennedy, an avocational fossil hunter, who collected the bone and later while cleaning the bone, discovered the engraving. Recognizing its potential importance, Kennedy contacted scientists at the University of Florida and the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute and National Museum of Natural History.

“This is an incredibly exciting discovery,” said Dennis Stanford, anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and co-author of this research. “There are hundreds of depictions of proboscideans on cave walls and carved into bones in Europe, but none from America—until now.”

The engraving is 3 inches long from the top of the head to the tip of the tail, and 1.75 inches tall from the top of the head to the bottom of the right foreleg. The fossil bone is a fragment from a long bone of a large mammal—most likely either a mammoth or mastodon, or less likely a giant sloth. A precise identification was not possible because of the bone’s fragmented condition and lack of diagnostic features. …

And Andrew Malcolm provides the best of late-night humor.

Leno: Congratulations to the new NBA champion Dallas Mavericks. They had a huge parade there, almost as big as the one in Cleveland.

Conan: LeBron James said the Heat’s NBA finals loss feels like “a personal failure.” Then someone explained to LeBron that it is a personal failure.

Letterman: More signs that LeBron James is not taking the Heat’s loss well. Today he demanded to see Dirk Nowitzki’s birth certificate.

Leno: Yup, the Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup. They said the key to their victory was not signing LeBron James.