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Roger Simon wraps up all the WikiLeaks highlights with Flipper’s help.

Because we know sifting through over a quarter of a million documents can be time-consuming for the average citizen and therefore somewhat daunting, Pajamas Media has hired a dozen dolphins from Sea World to go over the voluminous material. Working non-stop for several days, they have boiled it down to its essence.

Berlusconi likes girls.
Sarkozy likes himself.
Angela Merkel is boring.
David Cameron is more boring.
Hillary thinks Cristina needs a shrink.
Benjamin Netanyahu can’t stand Ehud Olmert.
Al Qaeda hates America.
Yemen’s president hates Al Qaeda
Ahmadinejad is Hitler
North Korea likes Iran.
Saudi Arabia hates Iran
Julian Assange is Dennis Kucinich.
PFC Manning will never see the sun again.
America needs a new president.

Marty Peretz comments on how we get one foreign policy mess after another from this administration.

…So, in the meantime, Hillary Clinton …has been sent out to stem the damage. If the damage can be stemmed, that is.  

…And here are her words verbatim: “The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information.” “Strongly condemns?” These are words she has recently used against Bibi Netanyahu. Though not, if I recall correctly, against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. …

…In pursuit of gaudy symbolic action during the presidential campaign, Obama pledged to shut down Guantanamo. Big deal! What in the end he had to do was to farm out prisoners to any country that would take them since the sovereign states of the United States would not. So when he was president he tried heavy-handed diplomacy on poor and small countries. Mostly, this “haggling,” as the Herald Tribune termed it in its article on the fate of the prison on the tip of Cuba, was a flop.

The administration offered the Slovenian president a 20 minute visit with Obama in exchange for “doing more” for “prisoner resettlement.” Lithuania ultimately refused to take a prisoner. So did Norway which had, so to speak, bestowed on Obama his Nobel Peace Prize. Finland also refused to admit prisoners but under threat from China. The proposed prisoners were Chinese Muslim Uighers. An elaborate venture of putting prisoners in Yemen exploded with al-Qaeda terrorism against the regime. Various transfer programs fell apart in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, even Afghanistan. Oh, and, yes, the principality of Luxembourg. This is a joke. John O. Brennan, for whom you may recall I do not have much respect, ran much of this utterly failed program. He will still be haughty. Of course. …

John Fund profiles the leading candidates for appropriations committee chair.

…Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, who is 76, chaired the committee in 2005 and 2006 during the height of the earmark frenzy. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that he steered hundreds of millions in federal funds to clients of lobbyist Bill Lowery, a former congressman who was so close to Mr. Lewis that they exchanged two key staff members, “making their offices so intermingled that they seem to be extensions of each other.” Mr. Lewis impressed some of his GOP colleagues with his experience yesterday in his formal presentation to become chairman, but he stumbled when he said he would keep most of his existing staff.

Rep. Hal Rogers of Kentucky, 73, was recently labeled “Oinker of the Year” by Citizens Against Government Waste. His more notorious earmarks include $21 million for the National Institute for Hometown Security. It’s located in the town of Somerset, which has a population of 11,000. Mr. Rogers argues that small towns in Kentucky are as vulnerable to terrorist attacks as major coastal cities and must play a role in defending themselves. Unlike Mr. Lewis, he told members that he would bring in fresh staff members to run Appropriations.

The dark horse candidate is Jack Kingston of Georgia. An appropriator and earmarker himself, Mr. Kingston says the committee’s new priority must be smaller government. He has presented House Republicans with a detailed game plan for limiting spending through caps that trigger automatic across-the-board spending cuts. And he points out that even at the height of the GOP spending spree when it controlled Congress, he used his perch as chair of an Appropriations subcommittee to curb spending on Congress by 1%. …

Would you want to fire your dentist and then have him work on your teeth again? David Harsanyi discusses the lame ducks.

…I join with all Americans who dream of a day when Washington is broken enough to see a Congress rigged to prevent any more “progress.” But the trouble with lame-duck sessions happens to be the opposite. It is one thing to be abused by democracy and quite another to be abused by a bunch of rejected, disgruntled and disconnected politicians.

…You could argue that Congress has a responsibility to deal with impending issues — unemployment benefits extensions or tax hikes, for instance. But should “repudiated” officials be involved in making long-lasting decisions for all of us?

… if Washington is “broken,” it is by those who abuse power in the name of moving forward. And the lame-duck Congress is just another example.

It is always a pleasure to hear from Thomas Sowell, particularly when it comes to dispelling the constantly repeated lie that tax cuts hurt the economy, tax cuts have to be paid for, and other lies that politicians tell us to make us keep paying them more of our money.

…But cuts in tax rates do not mean cuts in tax revenues…

These are not new arguments on either side. They go back more than 80 years. Over that long span of time, there have been many sharp cuts in tax rates under Presidents Calvin Coolidge, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. So we don’t need to argue in a vacuum. There is a track record.

What does that record say? It says, loud and clear, that cuts in tax rates do not mean cuts in tax revenues. In all four of these administrations, of both parties, so-called “tax cuts for the rich” led to increased tax revenues– with people earning high incomes paying not only a larger sum total of tax revenues, but even a higher proportion of all tax revenues.

Most important of all, these tax rate reductions spurred economic activity, which we definitely need today. …

Thomas Sowell explains that tax cuts increases government revenue, and increases the percentage of taxes paid by the rich. Send this article to your local congressman.

…Internal Revenue Service data show that there were 206 people who reported annual incomes of one million dollars or more in 1916. But, as the tax rate on high incomes skyrocketed under the Woodrow Wilson administration, that number plummeted to just 21 people reporting a million dollars a year in income five years later.

…Right after Congress enacted the cuts in tax rates…there were suddenly 207 people reporting taxable incomes of a million dollars or more in 1925. …

Where had all the income of those millionaires been hiding? In tax-exempt securities like state and local bonds, among other places. …

…The government, which collected less than $50 million in taxes on capital gains in 1924, suddenly collected well over $100 million in capital gains taxes in 1925. At lower tax rates, it no longer made sense to keep so much invested in tax-exempt securities, when more money could be made by investing in the economy.

As for “the rich…those in the highest income brackets paid 30 percent of all taxes in 1920 and 65 percent of all taxes by 1929, after “tax cuts for the rich.”

How can that be? Because high tax rates on paper, that many people avoid, often does not bring in as much tax revenue as lower tax rates that more people actually pay, after it is safe to come out of tax shelters and earn higher rates of taxable income. …

Ed Morrissey has an exciting post on the beginning of the end of ethanol.

Has the federal government’s appetite for ethanol ended?  A bipartisan group of Senators signed a letter today calling for an end to subsidies and tariffs designed to protect and enhance domestic production of ethanol, which has been until recently the darling of the alternative-energy movement.  In a sign of how far ethanol subsidies have fallen from favor, the letter addressed to both Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell has the signatures of such liberal luminaries as Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and the newly-elected Chris Coons…

…The letter makes clear just how much the government has intervened to coddle ethanol production:

Historically, our government has helped a product compete in one of three ways: subsidize it, protect it from competition, or require its use.  We understand that ethanol may be the only product receiving all three forms of support from the US government at this time.

It’s long past time for those efforts to cease.  Converting food to fuel not only doesn’t work as a replacement for gasoline, it expands starvation by artificially inflating corn prices and making it more difficult to purchase.  This letter might be the first step in dismantling an expensive and ongoing failure.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders comments on how effectively politicians can spend your money, and how effectively they can make decisions that hurt the economy and the environment.

In Greece earlier this month, Al Gore made a startling admission: “First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake.” Unfortunately, Americans have Gore to thank for ethanol subsidies. In 1994, then-Vice President Al Gore ended a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of an ethanol tax credit that added almost $5 billion to the federal deficit last year. And that number doesn’t factor the many ways in which corn-based ethanol mandates drive up the price of food and livestock feed.

…Back to Gore. There is a movement in Washington to end Gore’s mistake. Republican Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina have proposed ending the 45-cent-per-gallon subsidy on corn ethanol, which is set to expire on Dec. 31 unless Congress extends it.

As DeMint explained in an e-mail to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, “Government mandates and tax subsidies for ethanol have led to decreased gas mileage, adversely affected the environment and increased food prices. Washington must stop picking winners and losers in the market, and instead allow Americans to make choices for themselves.”…

John Podhoretz blogs about the latest poll numbers.

Rasmussen has just come out with a new poll of American adults indicating that 36 percent call themselves Republican and 34.7 percent Democrat. This is the first time in the history of Rasmussen’s polling, from 2004 to the present, that among all adults — not registered voters, not likely voters, but all adults — more consider themselves Republican than Democrat. Indeed, I believe it may be the first time in the history of major national polling that there has been such a finding.

Rasmussen writes: “In November 2008, following the presidential election, Democrats held a 7.6 percentage point advantage over the GOP. That means Republicans have picked up a net of approximately nine points over the past two years. That is a somewhat larger gain compared to the Democratic gains from the reelection of President Bush in 2004 to the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006. However, it is similar to the gains recorded by Democrats during the four-year period from Election 2004 to Election 2008.”

That nine-point shift means that something like 25 percent of American adults changed their minds about whether to call themselves Democrat or Republican in the past two years, and a similar percentage changed from 2004 to 2008. What we have here, then, is more evidence that we are in an uncommonly fluid, even unstable, political era. Anybody who thinks it’s possible to extrapolate from these numbers where we will be in 2012 is kidding himself, save one thing: Obama and the Democrats have to do something to alter the political dynamic in their favor, because people are saying they are Republican even though they don’t like the GOP very much either.

File this under the heading: some people don’t learn. In the Washington Examiner, Byron York reports on the folks in charge in Portland. Portland residents have the FBI to thank for keeping them safe, not Portland’s government.

In 2005, leaders in Portland, Oregon, angry at the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror, voted not to allow city law enforcement officers to participate in a key anti-terror initiative, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.  On Friday, that task force helped prevent what could have been a horrific terrorist attack in Portland.  Now city officials say they might re-think their participation in the task force — because Barack Obama is in the White House.

…What is ironic is that the operation that found and stopped Mohamud is precisely the kind of law enforcement work that Portland’s leaders, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected during the Bush years.  In April 2005, the Portland city council voted 4 to 1 to withdraw Portland city police officers from participating in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Mayor Tom Potter said the FBI refused to give him a top-secret security clearance so he could make sure the officers weren’t violating state anti-discrimination laws that bar law enforcement from targeting suspects on the basis of their religious or political beliefs.

Other city leaders agreed.  “Here in Portland, we are not willing to give up individual liberties in order to have a perception of safety,” said city commissioner Randy Leonard.  “It’s important for cities to know how their police officers are being used.”

…Now, there are indications that the Mohamud case might cause city leaders to change their mind about the FBI and the war on terror. Current mayor Sam Adams, who says he was not aware of the Mohamud investigation until after Mohamud had been arrested, told the Oregonian newspaper that he might as the city council to reconsider the decision to pull out of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.  Because he now realizes the city was wrong?  Not at all. “[Adams] stressed that he has much more faith in the Obama administration and the leadership of the U.S. Attorney’s office now than he did in 2005,” the paper reported.

So which of the package shippers will take care of your parcel best? Just in time for the holidays, Popular Mechanics’ Glenn Derene put them to the test. Looks like UPS comes out slightly ahead of FedEx and the USPS. The complete results are in the article.

…I called up a contact at National Instruments—an innovative manufacturer of industrial control equipment and software, based in Austin, Texas—and presented a challenge: Could the company help me disguise vibration sensors inside a package that I could secretly ship around the country? I soon got a call from National Instruments engineers Kelly Rink, Jamie Brettle and Rick Kuhlman, who agreed to build for me a self-powered data logger equipped with an ARM microcontroller evaluation board, a three-axis accelerometer and a massive Energizer Energi To Go XP18000 battery.

…Before the first journey, the ­National Instruments engineers collected baseline g-force readings. “We dropped the package from different heights, kicked it around our building, ran down the stairs with it in a backpack and took it on a car ride—giving real-world meaning to how many g’s the package endured,” says Kuhlman. The findings: A moderate jostle exerts 2 g’s, while a 2.5-foot drop registers 6 g’s; we set the latter as our limit for rough treatment. “Our co-workers thought we were a bit odd,” says Brettle, “but we assured them it was all in the name of science.”

…So which company treats your packages with the most tender loving care? After crunching the data and averaging the number of spikes recorded by each carrier on each trip, we found that the USPS has the gentlest touch, with a per-trip average of 0.5 acceleration spikes over 6 g’s. FedEx and UPS logged an average of three and two big drops per trip, respectively…

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Spengler uses the leaked cables to expand on Obama’s delusional utopian vision of the world, and the concern that some faltering nations will go the tragic route that Russia has gone.

…The initial reports suggest that the US State Department has massive evidence that Obama’s approach – “engaging” Iran and coddling Pakistan – has failed catastrophically. The crisis in diplomatic relations heralded by the press headlines is not so much a diplomatic problem – America’s friends and allies in Western and Central Asia have been shouting themselves hoarse for two years – but a crisis of American credibility.

Not one Muslim government official so much as mentioned the issues that have occupied the bulk of Washington’s attention during the past year, for example, Israeli settlements. The Saudis, to be sure, would prefer the elimination of all Israeli settlements; for that matter, they would prefer the eventual elimination of the state of Israel. In one conversation with a senior White House official, Saudi King Abdullah stated categorically that Iran, not Palestine, was his main concern…

…How do we explain the gaping chasm between Obama’s public stance and the facts reported by the diplomatic corps? The cables do not betray American secrets so much as American obliviousness. The simplest and most probable explanation is that the president is a man obsessed by his own vision of a multipolar world, in which America will shrink its standing to that of one power among many, and thus remove the provocation on which Obama blames the misbehavior of the Iranians, Pakistanis, the pro-terrorist wing of the Saudi royal family, and other enemies of the United States. …

Mort Zuckerman has a sobering opinion of the economy.

…The prognosis for America is especially discouraging. We have relied too heavily on surplus savings from abroad on top of running massive current account deficits. Until recent times, we ran deficits of this order only when we were engaged in a titanic war; otherwise we sought to achieve budget balances over a complete business cycle. But now we are running annual deficits of $1.4 trillion, about 10 percent of the total economy. We have compounded the deficits we accumulated over the last decade, so they now reach 61 percent of GDP. Only once before has the ratio of federal debt to GDP come in above 60 percent. That was after World War II. And our federal debt ratio today doesn’t even take into account Social Security and Medicare. Total liabilities and unfunded promises for Medicare and Social Security were about $62 trillion at the end of the last fiscal year, tripling from the year 2000, according to the calculations of former Comptroller General David Walker. Sixty-two trillion dollars is $200,000 per person and $500,000-plus for the average household. As Walker put it, the problem with these trust funds is “you can’t trust them [and] they’re not funded.” Therefore, he asserts, we ought to count them as a liability, which would bring the debt-to-GDP ratio to 91 percent.

…We clearly need to reduce our dependency on foreign lenders. Quite simply, we are mortgaging the future of our young people at record rates while we fail to improve education, healthcare, and a decaying infrastructure. How is it that we manage this while spending double per person what the average industrialized nation spends on such programs? Who could be surprised that so many Americans now fear that their children and grandchildren will not have as good a life as they had? Whose American dream?

…Fiscal responsibility and discipline are going to be critical issues in the formulation of public policy. The debates in this election season, sidetracked on emotional but marginal issues, have been depressing. We cannot continue to mortgage our future by reducing investments in our future, whether it be for education, infrastructure, or basic research. We still possess the most appealing popular culture and public values, as well as the most innovative and competent business culture. American exceptionalism endures. But we must confront our dysfunctional and profligate government. …

In Daily Markets, Michael Snyder gives us an overview of how economic numbers have gotten worse over the last four years.

…If you watch the economic statistics from week to week and month to month, it will seem like sometimes they are getting worse and sometimes they are getting better.  However, once you take a longer-term view of things, exactly what is happening to us starts to come clearly into focus.  The truth is that the United States is in the midst of a long-term economic collapse, and many economic statistics just keep getting worse every single year.

The following are 11 statistics that reveal just how far the U.S. economy has fallen over the past four years….

#1 In November 2006, the “official” U.S. unemployment rate was 4.5 percent.  Today, the “official” U.S. unemployment rate has been at 9.5 percent or greater for more than a year.

#2 At Thanksgiving back in 2006, 26 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, there are over 42 million Americans on food stamps and that number is climbing rapidly.

#3 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income in the United States fell from $51,726 in 2008 to $50,221 in 2009.  Median household income declined the year before that too.  Meanwhile, prices have continued to rise throughout that period. (Note that this statistic is even worse for the private sector when you consider that the Census number includes all the salary increases that government workers have continued to receive.)

#4 At the end of the third quarter in 2006, 47 banks were on the FDIC “problem list”.  At the end of the third quarter in 2010, 860 banks were on the FDIC “problem list”. …

Robert Samuelson gives a good snapshot of what led to Ireland’s economic troubles, and hints at the trouble that still looms.

What you need to know about Ireland’s economic crisis is that it’s not about Ireland: a country of slightly more than 4 million people and an economy of roughly $200 billion. It’s about Europe. For decades, Europe has pursued two great political projects. One is the democratic welfare state, designed to ensure that various “safety nets” improve economic justice. The other is European unity, symbolized by the creation in 1999 of a single currency—the euro—now used by 16 countries. The fact that both contributed to Ireland’s troubles suggests that Europe could be on the brink of a broader crisis.

Ireland’s problems are not isolated, and if they portend a wider meltdown, this would mark a dangerous new phase in the global economic turmoil that began in 2007. Europe represents about a fifth of the world economy, roughly equal to the U.S. share. If the continent relapsed into recession, economic nationalism would intensify as the already weak recovery faltered and countries competed for scarce sales. For example: Europe buys about 25 percent of America’s exports. These would suffer.

…Europe’s challenge is no longer just economic; it’s also political and social. The rescue of Ireland, as with Greece before, represents a gamble that Europe can win the patience of bondholders and voters: the first, not to dump bonds (of Ireland and other countries) in panic, which would raise interest rates and might precipitate a self-fulfilling financial collapse; and the second, to tolerate austerity (higher unemployment, lower social benefits, heavier taxes) without resorting to paralyzing street protests or ineffectual parliamentary coalitions. Whether the gamble will succeed is unclear, as are the chaotic consequences if it doesn’t.

In the Atlantic Blogs, Megan McArdle blogs about more trouble in the EU, and where this might lead.

As Spain starts looking rocky, Tyler Cowen writes:

In a nutshell, we’re watching the most pitched, highest-stakes, most determined battle between politics and finance which has been staged. I am expecting finance to win.

…Europe cannot let its banks fail, but it also can’t divert public pensions to line the pockets of bankers.  Yet it may well have to do one or the other.  I am also expecting finance to win.  Forget whether Germany has the political will to bail out the PIIGS: does either the EU, or the ECB, actually have the means to bail out all five?  If Spain topples, that is what it will come to.

This is starting to throw off more echoes of the Great Depression, where you have a sequence of crises, each touched off by the ones that came before, like dominos falling into some diabolic design. Europe and America thought they’d seen the worst of things by the end of 1930, only to be knocked back down even harder by the contagion of the Creditanstalt crisis.  In the US, the crisis ultimately triggered a string of bank failures worse than those sparked by the initial stock market crash, and the worst two years of the Great Depression were 1932-3. …

Michael Barone highlights the idea of letting states go into bankruptcy. Go to Pickings November 23, 2010 for Skeel’s article.

…University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel, writing in the Weekly Standard, suggests that Congress pass a law allowing states to go bankrupt.

Skeel, a bankruptcy expert, notes that a Depression-era statute allows local governments to go into bankruptcy. Some have done so: Orange County, Calif., in 1994; Vallejo, Calif., in 2008. Others — perhaps a dozen small municipalities in Michigan — are headed that way.

A state bankruptcy law would not let creditors thrust a state into bankruptcy — that would violate state sovereignty. But it would allow a state government going into bankruptcy to force a “cramdown,” imposing a haircut on bondholders, and to rewrite its union contracts.

The threat of bankruptcy would put a powerful weapon in the hands of governors and legislatures: They can tell their unions that they have to accept cuts now or face a much more dire fate in bankruptcy court. …

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Miracles never cease. Last week we closed with a bunch of items from center-left publications that have come to understand the mistake in the White House. One of those items was a column from Newsweek by Eleanor Clift that made the point there were too many people around the president telling him how wonderful he is. Now we open with a piece from Newsweek claiming Frederic Hayek is making a comeback. Go figure. This is not Jon Meacham’s Newsweek.

… In a sign of the times, some of the most popular videos on YouTube this year are satires on economic policy; the latest lampoons the Fed amid a growing feeling that policymakers are committing what economist Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” in micromanaging the economic cycle. Hayek hated policy intervention of any kind. Keynes, Friedman, and Hayek were leading lights of the three most influential schools of economic thought of the last century. Hayek was associated with the Austrian school, ascendant in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which argued that the private sector should be left free to carry out the task of any readjustment in a downturn. Faith in the market’s purging power served the U.S. well in the 19th century, when the economy emerged stronger after each recession, but was taken too far in the policy mix of tight money and high taxes that led to the Great Depression and the rise of the Keynesians.

Keynesianism and monetarism are now suffering a similar distortion. Keynes would probably never have supported big government deficits during boom times, such as those that led to our current debt crisis. Likewise, Friedman would probably not have backed the new Fed use of monetary policy as a tool to engineer expansion rather than merely cushion the pain in a downturn.

The systematic perversion of Keynes’s and Friedman’s thought is now resulting in a fall in their fortunes, leaving Hayek triumphant, once again.

Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor comments on Walter Russell Mead’s current assessment of nations around the world. He discusses Russia at length, which you can read in the full post.

Several times on the blog I’ve mused whether our current situation resembles more the 1930s or the 1970s.  As developments occur, I’m leaning more towards the former (although admittedly it is better to have the rogue states be Iran and North Korea, rather than Germany, Japan, Italy, and Russia, but even then the presence of nukes in the equation limits the comfort one can find in that).  Renowned foreign policy scholar Walter Russell Mead is of a similar mind.  …

He spares virtually no one.  Europe comes in for particular criticism, and very rightfully so.  To watch the delusional performance of the European “leadership” in its efforts to patch the gaping wounds in the Euro project (both the political and economic aspects)–which is doomed, utterly, in my view–is painful.  They are so wrapped up in their dream that they defy reality.  Mead is also quite critical of Japan–again with more than good cause.  He is also harsh in his judgment of the US, but he does not elaborate much on that in this post because he has made his case at length elsewhere.

The most interesting parts of Mead’s analysis pertain to China and Russia.  His analysis of China’s pressing problems, and the leadership’s apparent inability to cope with them, is a useful antidote to the conventional wisdom of China as Colossus, striding from triumph to triumph.  (To those with long enough memories, current portrayals of China evoke the popular image of Japan, circa 1988: although no analogy is exact, the utter failure of conventional wisdom in that instance should give pause to the advocates of the conventional wisdom regarding China, circa 2010.  Are you pausing, Tom Friedman?) …

In the Orange County Register, Jay Ambrose writes that good intentions do not make good government policies.

…those mortgages the government insisted banks bestow on those who could not afford to pay them? All they did was contribute mightily to a rash of foreclosures, the worst financial crisis in decades and a recession wrecking the lives of millions of people.

…To learn the real lowdown on how good motives can produce bad results, it helps to heed the writings and speeches of Jay Richards, a Princeton philosophy-theology Ph.D., author of “Money, Greed, and God,” …

“Piety is no substitute for technique,” he said …

A pilot, Richards wrote, may care deeply about his passengers, and that’s fine. But what you mostly want from the person in the cockpit is skill in flying the plane. And while people should care deeply about the poor, more than a caring heart is needed, Richards adds. An alert mind is just as necessary, one that understands, for instance, that free markets have succeeded remarkably in rescuing humankind from impoverishment at the same time various socialist escapades have failed miserably. …

One of last week’s Pickings featured Nicole Gelinas’ article on the new New Orleans. Schumpeter’s Blog at The Economist calls attention to it again.

NICOLE GELINAS has an excellent essay in the City Journal on what New Orleans can teach America about recovering from a crisis. Before Katrina, New Orleans was a basket case, albeit a charming one, with a corrupt government, an entitlement mentality and a decaying public sector. Today, it is on the road to recovery, not just rebuilding its hurricane-devastated infrastructure, but also recovering a civic spirit that was lost long before the hurricane. …

Gabriel Schoenfeld, in the WSJ, makes a good case for the intrusive but necessary airport security screening.

…Our adversaries have proved to be highly adaptive in their methods and unswerving in their efforts to bring down a large aircraft. It was inadequate screening in 2001 that allowed Richard Reid to board a flight from Paris to Miami with a bomb made of C-4 plastic explosives in his shoe. And it was insufficiently intrusive screening that last December enabled Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a bomb made of PETN in his underwear—which of course is why our underwear is now being searched.

…In July, Zachary Adam Chesser, a 20-year-old white male Muslim convert from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., was prevented from boarding a flight from New York to Uganda where he planned to join up with the Somali Muslim radical group al Shabaab. Hoping to avoid scrutiny, Chesser brought along his infant son. Some Palestinian groups, including Islamic Jihad and Hamas, have recruited children as young as 11 to smuggle explosives.

…Some terrorists, like Chesser, are clearly white. Some, like Abdulmutallab, are black. Jose Padilla, who contemplated setting off a dirty bomb in the U.S., is Hispanic. Colleen Renee LaRose, aka Jihad Jane, is female, blond and blue-eyed. As former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff noted at an Intelligence Squared debate earlier this week in New York City, by focusing exclusively on individuals of Middle Eastern appearance, racial profiling is both “over-inclusive and under-inclusive” at once. …

David Harsanyi thinks that we are sacrificing more liberty by allowing the TSA searches. He also comments on the hypocrisy of liberals who screamed about the government listening in on overseas phone calls, but are fine with intrusive body searches. As always, the hypocrisy goes both ways.

…Not so long ago, the left positioned itself as the defender of innocents against the just-one-tiny-step-away- from-fascism of the Bush administration’s war on terror. The Constitution was sacred, especially when we faced danger — and even more especially when a Republican was president.

…Many left-wing publications that cautioned us against George W. Bush’s ham-fisted intrusions now defend Barack Obama’s ham-fisted intrusions.

…Now, certainly, not every Democrat is insincere on the topic, nor is everyone on the right innocent.

For nearly a decade, Republicans have compromised and surrendered liberty in the name more safety — sometimes equating their policies with patriotism. And I simply can’t believe that we would be witnessing anywhere near the levels of conservative outrage regarding the TSA’s new security measures were we sitting in, say, 2005.

…And though I suspect we’ll be back to airport lock-stepping at the first sign of danger, it would be nice if this renewed adherence to personal autonomy would gain some traction and consistency no matter who happens to be president.

In the WaPo, Dana Milbank says that emulating Israel’s airplane security measures, proposed by some Republicans, isn’t feasible.

…The Israeli model for airport screening has, without a doubt, been successful. But do these guys have any idea what they are proposing? Replicating the Israeli model in the United States would easily cost $40 billion a year – and possibly many times that. That would wind up being more expensive than supposed big-government boondoggles such as the Troubled Assets Relief Program and the auto bailout, and it would wipe out Republican promises to cut spending.

…In a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, Israel uses profiling, background checks and extensive interviews to filter out the highest-risk fliers, who are then subjected to searches of luggage and person more invasive than anything the Transportation Security Administration has conjured. The air security argument has been about whether Americans would prefer Israeli-style profiling to the current system of body scans and pat-downs. But this overlooks a more fundamental problem: The Israeli system, even if it could be scaled up, is out of our price range.

…And that might understate the cost of staffing the nation’s sprawling air travel system with highly skilled interrogators; Israel, after all, has only one major airport. In Foreign Policy magazine, Annie Lowrey calculated early this year that if each passenger flying through a U.S. airport were subjected to 10 minutes of questioning by a guard, we would need 3 million full-time guards, at a cost of more than $150 billion a year. …

Jeff Jacoby comes up with good reasons to kick NPR off the gravy train.

…Notwithstanding NPR’s haughty air of entitlement, there are at least four reasons why its taxpayer subsidies should end.

…3. They aren’t necessary. NPR’s partisans claim that public broadcasting provides valuable news and educational content that listeners can’t get anywhere else. That may have been a plausible argument in 1970. It is utterly implausible today, when audio programming of every description can be found amid a vast and dizzying array of outlets: terrestrial and satellite radio, Internet broadcasting, podcasts, and audio downloads.

4. They aren’t affordable. At a time of trillion-dollar federal deficits and a national debt of nearly $14 trillion, NPR’s government subsidies cannot possibly be justified. All the more so when public broadcasting attracts a fortune in private funding, from the gifts of innumerable “listeners like you’’ to the $200 million bequeathed to NPR by the late Joan Kroc in 2003.

More than anything else, the incoming 112th Congress has a mandate to stem the flood of red ink that is drowning Washington in debt. The tax dollars consumed by NPR are admittedly a drop in the enormous fiscal bucket. But if Congress can’t even do away with a frill like subsidies for public radio, how will it stand a prayer of shoving far more formidable gluttons away from the federal trough?

How do you save the tiger when all conservation efforts so far have failed? Inject some market capitalism, says the Economist.

…Over the past decade tiger numbers have fallen by 40%. Today there are no more than 3,200 wild tigers, down from 100,000 a century ago. They occupy 7% of their historic range, and three of the nine tiger subspecies are extinct: the Bali tiger, the Caspian tiger and the south China tiger. Worse, only 1,000 of the tigers out there are breeding females. And these are scattered thinly over 13 nations, four of which no longer have viable breeding populations. Poaching is the greatest threat, followed by habitat loss. Around 1,000 tigers are known to have been killed for the illegal trade over the past decade…

…As tiger-conservation expert Kirsten Conrad explains neatly in an interview on the Mongabay website, 35 years of a trade ban has failed because demand for tiger is price inelastic – a point The Economist has been trying to make for some time. People will buy tiger, even if the price goes up. Increasing the amount of money spent on enforcement may, therefore, simply not work.  

The solution is to breed tigers, sell them and use the revenue to pay for wild tiger conservation and re-introductions in perpetuity. The Chinese are already good at breeding tigers. The precedent for a controlled trade is a good one. The American alligator was almost driven to extinction by hunting, but a combination of farming and protection, that was gradually relaxed, means that today around 30,000 wild alligators can be killed each year in Louisiana (the main home of the American alligator) and the population is still growing. These, together with farmed animals (farms must also contribute financially to the wild population) generate $20m in revenue for the state every year. 

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Wikileaks’ newest leaks brought Toby Harnden back from vacation.

… Overall though, there is little to justify the screaming headlines of American foreign policy in crisis or being turned upside down. Instead, it’s a case of so far, so blah.

But you can see here the tantalising dates, subjects and places of origin of tens of thousands of other cables.

It seems to me that Assange is teasing Obama. Whereas the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs could be largely dismissed as Bush era material that didn’t really reflect on Obama, the State Department cables are different.

They go up to 28 February 2010, offering a potential window on Obama’s foreign policy which may well not show it in the sainted light he would prefer.  It seems to me that Assange is teasing Obama, letting him know what WikiLeaks has and making him sweat.

Today was round one and the action was pretty tame. But there are plenty more rounds to come and Obama is on the back foot.

In Chequerboard, Pejman Yousefzadeh posts how Jimmy Carter’s ideas on North Korea would be detrimental to foreign relations.

“The United States should engage in ‘diplomatic niceties’ by accepting the North Korean demand for bilateral talks with the U.S., irrespective of the fact that by doing so, we would cut out the other four parties to talks concerning North Korea . . . including South Korea.”  – Jimmy Carter

In return for all of this, we are supposedly promised that discussion concerning an “array of centrifuges” from an advanced nuclear facility in North Korea would be “on the table.” Of course, “on the table” does not mean that “the North Koreans will agree with American demands concerning nuclear policy,” but Carter elides that point. He also elides the fact that even if–as is likely–the North Koreans balk at American demands concerning the development of nuclear weapons by Pyongyang, the precedent for bilateral talks will be established, the six-party talks will be dead, the United States will have no formal process (and likely no informal one either) to bring pressure to bear on North Korea via cooperation with China, Russia, and Japan, and South Korea will be permanently undercut. Pulling the plug on South Korea’s participation in this issue, by the way, would only serve to confirm North Korea’s contention that South Korea’s armed forces–and much of its foreign policy, by implication–are “controlled from Washington,” an argument as silly as Carter’s contention that “our close diplomatic and military ties with South Korea make us compliant with its leaders’ policies”; apparently, South Korea, along with Israel, robs the United States of the ability to formulate and implement policies that are in accord with our national interest. …

Jennifer Rubin blogs on “desperate” times at the White House.

The most common adjective used to describe the administration these days is “desperate.” It is desperate to get a New START deal, and get it now. It is “desperate” to restart the non-direct, non-peace talks. It has made common cause with the Fed’s “desperate” bond-buying scheme.

The increasingly frantic policy gambits can be attributed to the attempt to convince the voters that Obama is not a failed president. If only he can get a deal on — fill in the blank — then he’ll cut the losing streak and regain his political mojo. The theory is as, well, desperate as are the individual schemes. The president’s difficulties stem from his jobs-killing agenda, his misunderstanding of the Middle East and most other foreign policy conflicts,  and his inability to relate to voters. Should he manage to force through a largely irrelevant New START treaty or eke out another 90 days of Middle East talks, would this restore his luster? Hardly. And in the meantime, most especially in his enthusiasm for the Fed’s decision to rev up the printing press, Obama reveals his own political weakness, economic illiteracy, and foreign policy fabulism. In short, none of it is helping.

Rubin also comments on a couple aspects of the stalled Middle East peace process. We highlight the lack of trust that the Obami have engendered:

It’s a game of chicken. Bibi has agreed to present to his cabinet the Obami’s harebrained scheme to restart the non-peace talks if he can get it in writing. Why is that so hard? Perhaps the deal isn’t the deal, or the administration is placing conditions upon conditions. …

…Netanyahu is also apparently unwilling to pledge to wrap up an agreement on borders during the time when there is a settlement freeze. And the US, for its part, is reportedly unwilling to commit in writing that this would be the last settlement freeze it would ask for, apparently wanting to keep open the option of another freeze if the border issue was not wrapped up during one 90-day freeze.

Whoa! Wasn’t part of the deal that the Obami would never, ever, cross their hearts, ask for another freeze? If there is a method to this chaotic bribe-a-thon, it’s not yet apparent. Unlike the Bush team, which actually had the parties talking to each other, this crew can only bicker about what it is that they offered Israel in order to induce the PA to return to the table. If there has been a less competent Middle East negotiating team, I can’t recall it.

Charles Krauthammer writes an excellent article on the foolishness of Obama’s stance on nuclear reduction and START.

…President Obama insists that New START is important as a step toward his dream of a nuclear-free world. Where does one begin? … We voluntarily disarm while the world’s rogues and psychopaths develop nukes in secret. Just last week we found out about a hidden, unknown, highly advanced North Korean uranium enrichment facility. An ostensibly nuclear-free world would place these weapons in the hands of radical regimes that would not hesitate to use them – against a civilized world that would have given up its deterrent.

…Obama’s New START treaty is 90 percent useless and 10 percent problematic. One difficulty is that it restricts the number of delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons. But because some of these are dual-use, our ability to deliver long-range conventional weapons, a major U.S. strategic advantage, is constrained.

The second problem is the recurrence of language in the treaty preamble linking offensive to defensive nuclear weaponry. We have a huge lead over the rest of the world in missile defenses. Ever since the Reagan days, the Russians have been determined to undo this advantage. The New START treaty affirms the “interrelationship” between offense and defense. And Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has insisted that “the unchangeability of circumstances” – translation: no major advances in U.S. anti-missile deployment – is a condition of the entire treaty.

The worst thing about this treaty, however, is that it is simply a distraction. It gives the illusion of doing something about nuclear danger by addressing a non-problem, Russia, while doing nothing about the real problem – Iran and North Korea. The utter irrelevance of New START to nuclear safety was dramatically underscored last week by the revelation of that North Korean uranium enrichment plant, built with such sophistication that it left the former head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory “stunned.” It could become the ultimate proliferation factory. Pyongyang is already a serial proliferator. It has nothing else to sell. Iran, Syria and al-Qaeda have the money to buy. …

Caroline Glick assesses Obama’s foreign policy, in the Jerusalem Post.

…In the midst of all these crises, Obama has maintained faith with his two central foreign policy goals: forcing Israel to withdraw to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines and scaling back the US nuclear arsenal with an eye towards unilateral disarmament. That is, as the forces of mayhem and war escalate their threats and aggression, Obama’s central goals remain weakening the US’s most powerful regional ally in the Middle East and rendering the US incompetent to deter or defeat rapidly proliferating rogue states that are at war with the US and its allies.

…A US president’s maneuver room in foreign affairs is always very small. The foreign policy establishment in the Washington is entrenched and uniformly opposed to bending to the will of elected leaders. The elites in the State Department and the CIA and their cronies in academia and policy circles in Washington are also consistently unmoved by reality, which as a rule exposes their policies as ruinous. …

…Given the threats Obama’s radical policies are provoking, it can only be hoped that through hearings and other means, the Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives will take an active role in curbing his policies. If they are successful, the American people and the international community will owe them a debt of gratitude.

Abe Greenwald draws parallels between what North Korea is and what Iran may become if the US does not act.

…Our paralysis on North Korea, therefore, makes one thing clear: we cannot, for any reason, allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. The only good option today is to ensure that we do not end up with “no good options” when faced with an aggressive and unpredictable nuclear Islamic Republic. If guessing at Kim Jong-il’s motives makes fools of us all, just imagine trying to react to a nuclear theocratic thug-state perpetually sponsoring regional terror and frozen in a cold domestic revolution. …Worst of all, where the cult of Kim is unpredictable, the doctrine of Khomeinist Islamism is not. Pyongyang may ultimately only want goodies or talks or an unfettered palace ascendancy. For the leaders in Tehran, however, everything is a means to defeating America and her allies.

On Saturday, Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s atomic-energy organization, announced that the country’s first nuclear power plant, in Bushehr, has been completely fueled. As Stephen Bosworth would put it, we are not surprised by this. Whether we are prepared to do anything about it remains to be seen. …

David Harsanyi thinks it’s time to start asking questions, and getting answers, about the Fed’s actions.

…now that the Fed has begun a second round of “quantitative easing” — colloquially known as QE2, or “printing a load of money and giving it to big banks” — it will drop another $600 billion into the economy even though the first round of more than $1 trillion failed to do much of anything. In fact, more than $3 trillion has been thrown into the economic mix since we started fixing the recession.

Many economists argue that this kind of policy has the potential to feed economic bubbles, distort trade, push nations to engage in competing devaluations, cause long-term inflation at home and transform your dollar into something … well, less.

…Why are these kinds of far-reaching decisions regarding our economic future immune from political debate and legitimate public scrutiny? In no other sphere of public policymaking is anyone as inoculated from accountability…

…Another letter from two dozen experts — including Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director, and Stanford University Professor John Taylor, the man who designed monetary-policy formula on interest rates used by the Fed — laying out concerns went ignored.

…Now, the argument for Fed autonomy is based on the importance of monetary stability. But to the columnist, it seems that the Fed is causing more unease, unpredictability and concern among investors and citizens than ever. Once the Fed instigates volatility, doesn’t the argument for political intervention dissipate? …

Peter Schiff discusses the conflicting policy mandates of the Fed.

Given the opposing views of the potentially parsimonious new Congress and the continuously accommodative Federal Reserve, there is a movement afoot among Republicans to eliminate the Fed’s “dual mandate.” Prior to 1977, the Fed only had one job: maintaining price stability. However, the stagflation of the 1970s inspired politicians to assign another task: promoting maximum employment. This “mission creep” has transformed the Fed from a monetary watchdog into an instrument of social policy. We would do well to give them back their original job.  

…The best way for the Fed to ensure maximum employment is to focus on its one true job – creating price stability. The irony of the dual mandate is that by trying to satisfy both, the Fed ensures that we will get neither.

… the Fed lowers the cost of labor through inflation. However, this inefficient solution to a simple problem creates negative consequences for the economy. While wages may go up with inflation, goods prices usually rise faster. The net result offers no benefit for workers. By tricking workers into accepting lower wages, the Fed allows politicians to claim meaningless victories. 

…The real reason that prices rise, for both goods and wages, is that the Fed creates inflation. This policy undermines the economy by destroying both current savings and the incentives to accumulate future savings. Since savings finance capital investment, lower savings equal weaker economic growth. …

More on Al Gore’s ethanol reverse. WSJ editors have it.

Anyone who opposes ethanol subsidies, as these columns have for decades, comes to appreciate the wisdom of St. Jude. But now that a modern-day patron saint—St. Al of Green—has come out against the fuel made from corn and your tax dollars, maybe this isn’t such a lost cause.

…”It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol,” Al Gore told a gathering of clean energy financiers in Greece this week. The benefits of ethanol are “trivial,” he added, but “It’s hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going.”

No kidding, and Mr. Gore said he knows from experience: “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for President.”

Mr. Gore’s mea culpa underscores the degree to which ethanol has become a purely political machine: It serves no purpose other than re-electing incumbents and transferring wealth to farm states and ethanol producers. Nothing proves this better than the coincident trajectories of ethanol and Mr. Gore’s career.

…Meanwhile, the greens have slowly turned against corn ethanol, thanks to the growing scientific evidence that biofuels increase carbon emissions more than fossil fuels do. …

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Marty Peretz takes Jimmy Carter to task.

The former president has been gulled once again, this time by the Communist regime in North Korea, a very brutal system of control, indeed. It’s not the first time that the Kim dynasty has taken him in. But it is the ex-president at his most outlandishly doltish.

Take the column Carter published this week in the Washington Post. It argues the good intentions of the dictatorship with regard to nuclear weapons. But it does so only by assertion and reassertion.

“This past July I was invited to return to Pyongyang to secure the release of an American, Aijalon Gomes, with the proviso that my visit would last long enough for substantive talks with top North Korean officials. They spelled out in detail their desire to develop a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and a permanent cease-fire, based on the 1994 agreements and the terms adopted by the six powers in September 2005. With no authority to mediate any disputes, I relayed this message to the State Department and White House. Chinese leaders indicated support of this bilateral discussion. …”

This is not the first time that someone so significant has argued the good intentions of a Marxist tyranny. More than six decades ago, Henry Wallace, who was dumped from the vice presidency by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, went on a rampage of support for the Soviet Union. After all, Wallace argued, the Red Kremlin had been pushed by the aggressive policies of the United States and its allies. …

In the Corner, Veronique de Rugy has a deficit graph that’s worth looking over.

Richard Epstein explains one way in which Obamacare gives inappropriate power to bureaucrats.

…Since the politicos miscalculated the regulatory burdens, they have to brace for the real possibility that some health care plans will collapse under the strain.  Starting in late September, reality hit home when McDonald’s announced that it would have cut out its “mini-med” program for about 30,000 of its low-paid workers. It insisted that it could not meet the statutory requirements for the simple reason that high employee turnover raises administrative costs.

Rather than face this public relations disaster, Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, granted a one-year waiver from the requirements of the program.  That particular result does not stand alone.  Since that time fresh waivers have been routinely dispensed by the Department of Health and Human Services to many other organizations, including many powerful unions. At least one million workers are now out from under ObamaCare, with more to come.

The process vividly shows how unrealistic expectations can undermine the rule of law.  Waivers are by definition an exercise of administrative discretion that benefits the party who receives its special dispensation.  Yet nothing in ObamaCare explains who should receive these waivers or why.

The dangers from this uncertainty are enormous. Make no mistake about it, a waiver gives the favored organization a competitive advantage over its rivals. But it is not only one applicant that pulls out all the stops.  Its competitors often follow suit while simultaneously trying to block the waiver for the original applicant.  Administrative expertise quickly takes a back seat to old-fashioned political muscle and intrigue. …

George Will profiles California Congressman Kevin McCarthy.

…The reason Republicans think winning the presidency in 2012 is essential to fulfilling the promise of 2010 is that Barack Obama, former paladin of change, will veto change. So McCarthy understands that, pending a Republican president, much of Republican governance must occur down in the weeds of government – in the Federal Register, the record of the regulations by which the executive branch exercises its will without much congressional supervision or circumscription.

But looking up from the weeds at the clouds, McCarthy has a dismaying desire to bring a “futurist” to speak to the Republican caucus each week. This betrays an unconservative faith in prophets – pursuing prophecy is a recipe for forfeiting the present – and is a depressing reminder of Speaker Newt Gingrich’s swoon about Alvin Toffler’s books “Future Shock” and “The Third Wave.” Gingrich said of himself, oxymoronically, “I am a conservative futurist.” Fascination with clairvoyants is, however, symptomatic of an unconservative hankering to surf supposed “waves” of history and to put government in the service of, and society in harness to, Big Ideas.

…The biggest threat to Republicans, who are currently flushed with victory, is, McCarthy thinks, the delusion that “they won the election. They didn’t win anything.” Rather, Democrats got themselves fired. McCarthy is too polite to say that the Democrats were terminated because they, like the president, misread the 2008 elections as much more than the electorate’s pink slip for Republicans who were spendthrifts at home and blunderers abroad. …

Michael Barone looks at election demographics.

Some reflections on the revolution of 2010, based on extended examination of the election returns.

Gentry liberals: The tsunami swept from the George Washington Bridge to the Donner Pass, but didn’t wash away affluent liberals to the east and west of these geographic markers. Also surviving were the cannibals — the public employee unions that are threatening to bankrupt states like California and New York, a prospect that doesn’t faze the left-leaning gentry. In these areas Republicans picked up one House seat anchored in Staten Island, two in New Hampshire and one in Washington state, and they came close in two California districts wholly or partly in the Central Valley. Gentry liberal territory stayed staunchly Democratic. …

…Germano-Scandinavian America: …Republican gains in state legislatures were even more impressive. They will control the redistricting process in four of the five states in this region. The exception is Illinois, where Rod Blagojevich’s successor as governor, Pat Quinn, held on by a few thousand votes — helped perhaps by the refusal of some Democratic county clerks not to send out military ballots in the time required by federal law. They did manage to send unrequested ballots to inmates of the Cook County Jail, though. …

In Slate, Kate Roiphe ponders the current parenthood paradigm.

Last year, a friend of mine sent a shipment of green rubber flooring, at great impractical expense, to a villa in the south of France because she was worried that over the summer holiday her toddler would fall on the stone floor. Generations of French children may have made their way safely to adulthood, walking and falling and playing and dreaming on these very same stone floors, but that did not deter her in her determination to be safe. This was, I think, an extreme articulation of our generation’s common fantasy: that we can control and perfect our children’s environment. And lurking somewhere behind this strange and hopeless desire to create a perfect environment lies the even stranger and more hopeless idea of creating the perfect child.

Of course, for most of us, this perfect, safe, perpetually educational environment is unobtainable; an ineffable dream we can browse through in Dwell, or some other beautiful magazine, with the starkly perfect Oeuf toddler bed, the spotless nursery. Most of us do not raise our children amidst a sea of lovely and instructive wooden toys and soft cushiony rubber floors and healthy organic snacks, but the ideal exists and exerts its dubious influence.

This fantasy of control begins long before the child is born, though every now and then a sane bulletin lands amidst our fashionable perfectionism, a real-world corrective to our over-arching anxieties. I remember reading with some astonishment, while I was pregnant, a quiet, unsensational article about how one study showed that crack babies turned out to be doing as well as non-crack babies. Here we are feeling guilty about goat’s cheese on a salad, or three sips of wine, and all the while these ladies, lighting crack pipes, are producing intelligent and healthy offspring. While it’s true that no one seemed to be wholeheartedly recommending that pregnant women everywhere take up crack for relaxation, the fundamental irony does appear to illustrate a basic point: which is that children, even in utero, are infinitely more adaptable and hardy and mysterious than we imagine. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, James Delingpole blogs on the true state of global energy resources. There is no shortage.

…The Global Warming Policy Foundation (Happy anniversary, GWPF!) has collated several pieces which offer a helpful counter to this hackneyed, and too often unquestioned, eco-fascist narrative.

Here’s the New York Times: …

“Just as it seemed that the world was running on fumes, giant oil fields were discovered off the coasts of Brazil and Africa, and Canadian oil sands projects expanded so fast, they now provide North America with more oil than Saudi Arabia. In addition, the United States has increased domestic oil production for the first time in a generation.

Meanwhile, another wave of natural gas drilling has taken off in shale rock fields across the United States, and more shale gas drilling is just beginning in Europe and Asia. Add to that an increase in liquefied natural gas export terminals around the world that connected gas, which once had to be flared off, to the world market, and gas prices have plummeted.

Energy experts now predict decades of residential and commercial power at reasonable prices. Simply put, the world of energy has once again been turned upside down.” …

…Does any of this sound to you like evidence that the world is facing the kind of energy crisis which can only be solved by concerted government intervention?…

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We have found some more things for which to be thankful. We go, outside our normal sources, to Politico, Newsweek, Washington Post, Huffington Post and Time to learn some on the left have finally figured out they helped put a dud in the White House.

Ben Smith of Politico says the president has the Israelis and Palestinians in one agreement. They agree he has screwed up the Middle East.

Vowing to change a region that has resisted the best efforts of presidents and prime ministers past, Barack Obama dove head first into the Middle East peace process on his second day in office.

He was supposed to be different. His personal identity, his momentum, his charisma and his promise of a fresh start would fundamentally alter America’s relations with the Muslim world and settle one of its bitterest grievances.

Two years later, he has managed to forge surprising unanimity on at least one topic: Barack Obama. A visit here finds both Israelis and Palestinians blame him for the current stalemate – just as they blame one another.

Instead of becoming a heady triumph of his diplomatic skill and special insight, Obama’s peace process is viewed almost universally in Israel as a mistake-riddled fantasy. And far from becoming the transcendent figure in a centuries-old drama, Obama has become just another frustrated player on a hardened Mideast landscape.

The current state of play sums up the problem. Obama’s demand that the Israelis stop building settlements on the West Bank was met, at long last, by a temporary and partial freeze, but its brief renewal is now the subject of intensive negotiations.

Meanwhile, Palestinian leaders have refused American demands to hold peace talks with the Israelis before the freeze is extended. Talks with Arab states over gestures intended to build Israeli confidence – a key part of Obama’s early plan — have long since been scrapped.

The political peace process to which Obama committed so much energy is considered a failure so far. And in the world’s most pro-American state, the public and its leaders have lost any faith in Obama and – increasingly — even in the notion of a politically negotiated peace.

Even those who still believe in the process that Obama has championed view his conduct as a deeply unfunny comedy of errors. …

Eleanor Clift of Newsweek thinks the president’s aides should stop telling him how wonderful he is. 

Democrats got the lowest share of the white vote in this midterm election than in any congressional election since World War II, losing key races in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Michigan, and every contested election in Ohio, which spells trouble for President Obama’s reelection. No Democrat can win the White House without these Midwestern swing states, and they are all decimated by job losses that Obama has offered no road map to recover.

Soul-searching is under way at the White House, but so far it looks pretty sterile. There’s no Dick Morris sneaking in with advice from outside the bubble, or late-night bull sessions with Terry McAuliffe about how to raise money and stage a comeback. Granted, some of the tactics these Clinton-era advisers used wouldn’t pass muster with the Obama crowd, or with Common Cause, but they shook up the White House and got Clinton out of his post-election funk and into fighting form.

Part of Obama’s problem is that there’s too much hero worship around him, and that translates into a reluctance to fault him for anything, except maybe that he didn’t make a good enough case for all the wonderful things he’s done. …

Jackson Diehl of WaPo thinks it’s time for the president to grow up.

For help understanding the foreign policy headlines of the past week, let’s return, briefly, to the spring of 1983, when Barack Obama was a student at Columbia University. What were the burning international issues of that time?

Well, first was the “nuclear freeze” movement, which was prompting mass demonstrations around the world by people worried about the standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States. Obama published an article about it in a campus magazine in which he invoked the vision of “a nuclear free world.”

The Middle East, meanwhile, was still reeling from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon – which was the apotheosis of the Zionist right’s dream of creating a “greater Israel” including all of the Palestinian West Bank.

Back to November 2010. The Obama administration is devoting a big share of its diplomatic time and capital to curbing Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank – most recently, offering Israel’s right-wing government $3 billion in warplanes in exchange for a 90-day moratorium. Meanwhile, it has committed much of its dwindling domestic political capital to pushing a new nuclear arms control treaty with Russia through a reluctant Senate.

So has nothing changed in the past quarter-century? In fact, almost everything has – especially when it comes to nuclear arms control and Israel’s national objectives. What hasn’t changed, it seems, is Barack Obama – who has led his administration into a foreign policy time warp that is sapping its strength abroad and at home. …

Here’s Robert Kuttner, editor of the far-left American Prospect, writing in the Huffington Post.

… So as President Obama gears up for a re-election battle in 2012, the economy is unlikely to be much different than the one that sank the Democrats in 2010. The question is whether Obama and the Democrats can change the national understanding of what caused the economic collapse and who is blocking the recovery.

In this enterprise, I don’t have high expectations for Obama. I cannot recall a president who generated so much excitement as a candidate but who turned out to be such a political dud as chief executive. Nor do his actions since the election inspire confidence that he will be reborn as a fighter.

The president’s defenders offer an assortment of alibis for the epic defeat. …

For a change of pace, Time’s Mark Halperin takes a look at some of the GOP’s new governors.

Republican governors are going to have a big hand in writing the next chapter of American history. Their GOP brethren in Washington will be tussling with President Obama to reach either stalemate or compromise (or some fitful combination of the two), thus obscuring a real test of Republican governing philosophy on the Potomac. Meanwhile, in places such as Tallahassee, Fla.; Madison, Wis.; Columbus, Ohio; Lansing, Mich.; and Santa Fe, N.M., freshly elected Republican governors will present their party’s goals and themes for a 2011 agenda. They will be focusing on the same economic issues that Republicans used to win not only gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey in 2009, but also Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat in January 2010 and races from coast to coast in the midterms: debt, deficits, Obama’s health care law, no new taxes, no expansion of government.

Much like the federal government, the state governments face a basic set of problems: sluggish or negligible job creation, simultaneous pressure for budget cuts and measures to stimulate growth, zero public appetite for more taxes, and a healthy skepticism about the government’s capacity to fix what ails America. …

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According to Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy, there’s a chance we might get to kill the ethanol mandates.

Maybe it’s the new mood in Congress.  Maybe the stars are aligned.  Whatever the cause, opposition to ethanol subsidies is cropping up in some unusual places — and just in time, as ethanol tax credits are set to expire in a few weeks.

Back in 2000, then-Vice President Al Gore touted ethanol subsidies as good for farmers and the environment.  This was no surprise, as the Clinton-Gore Administration worked to expand ethanol mandates under the Clean Air Act.  However much ethanol programs helped corn farmers, they were never much good for the environment, something Gore now admits.  Reuters reports:

“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol,” said Gore, speaking at a green energy business conference in Athens sponsored by Marfin Popular Bank.

“First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.

“It’s hard once such a programme is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going.”

Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum, Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Jim DeMint (R-SC) are taking aim at ethanol subsidies as yet another special-interest energy policy boondoggle that should be opposed by free-marketeers and environmental activists alike.  Greg Sargent reports: …

More on Gore’s ethanol volte-face from Ed Morrissey.

… Why, then, did Gore spend most of the last two decades pushing for ethanol subsidies?  It wasn’t because he was trying to help humanity:

“One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president.”

In other words, Gore wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about ethanol; he was just particularly enthusiastic about Gore.  Thanks to pressure from Gore and others with “a certain fondness” for playing prairie politics over common sense, the US spent almost $8 billion subsidizing ethanol in just the last year.  Slate reported in 2005 that between 1995 and 2003, ethanol subsidies went over $37 billion in the US, most of which took place in the Clinton/Gore administration. …

And a Union-Leader editor from New Hampshire has more on the impact of Gore’s truth telling.

… The point is not that Gore is entirely wrong. It’s that he is wrong enough (remember the errors in An Inconvenient Truth) to merit skepticism. But law doesn’t take skeptics’ views into account. Environmental regulations compel compliance. Only in the market does the skepticism of the minority become an important player. If Al Gore bases his personal financial investments on faulty science, it matters to no one but Al Gore, and perhaps his wife. But if states base environmental regulations on faulty science he pushed, we are all harmed.

The great ethanol error would’ve been corrected quickly had the market been left in control. It was only the misguided hand of government that grew this problem to global proportions, and perpetuates it still.

This fall the EPA approved a waiver allowing gasoline to contain up to 15 percent ethanol for cars made since 2007. Congress has mandated that 13.95 billion gallons of renewable fuels (mostly ethanol) be produced in 2011, up from 12.95 billion gallons this year. (Can you imagine how much worse it would be had Gore been president?)

The bottom line is this: If we cannot base our environmental policies on the pronouncements of Al Gore, should we really be passing costly, far-reaching mandates that force people to behave as Al Gore would want them to?Wouldn’t it be better to let the market decide, and leave Al Gore to investing heavily in biofuel companies?

Nicole Gelinas is not about to be fooled, so her City Journal report on success in New Orleans is important.

Five years ago, when Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast, even optimistic observers had good reason to doubt that New Orleans would recover. It wasn’t just that the storm had destroyed much of the city, leaving parts of it under 20 feet of water for weeks. New Orleans had long suffered from terrible violence, a poisonous political culture, and a fleeing population. Its public services were iffy on a good day, making it especially unprepared for the storm. What chance did it stand of returning to life—even with the $71.5 billion that the Bush White House and Congress sent to Louisiana for hurricane recovery?

Yet the city has come back more vigorously than most imagined possible, even fumbling its way toward becoming, maybe, an urban success story. With about 365,000 residents, the City That Care Forgot has recovered more than 80 percent of its pre-Katrina population, and its post-storm economy has done well, too: in July, unemployment in the city and surrounding suburbs was 7.5 percent, two points below the recession-battered national figure, while per-capita income is up more than 20 percent since 2004, even as traditional government-aid payments, such as welfare and Medicaid, remain lower. Visit New Orleans today, and you’ll see a busy construction site, not a city laid waste by flooding.

The shock of Katrina, it turns out, produced a surprising renaissance in citizen initiative, one result of which was widespread recognition among New Orleanians that all that federal cash wasn’t going to solve the city’s long-standing problems on its own. Instead, engaged residents have kept local politicians on their toes, making sure that they use the recovery funds to transform and rejuvenate the city. They have taught the rest of the country, still reeling from the financial and economic crisis, a lesson: how to do recovery right. …

Foreign Policy has an interesting article on the aging of the world’s population. It has the added benefit of making fun on Paul Ehrlich at the onset. Don’t forget Obama’s science advisor is a Ehrlich groupie.

Not so long ago, we were warned that rising global population would inevitably bring world famine. As Paul Ehrlich wrote apocalyptically in his 1968 worldwide bestseller, The Population Bomb, “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Obviously, Ehrlich’s predicted holocaust, which assumed that the 1960s global baby boom would continue until the world faced mass famine, didn’t happen. Instead, the global growth rate dropped from 2 percent in the mid-1960s to roughly half that today, with many countries no longer producing enough babies to avoid falling populations. Having too many people on the planet is no longer demographers’ chief worry; now, having too few is.

It’s true that the world’s population overall will increase by roughly one-third over the next 40 years, from 6.9 to 9.1 billion, according to the U.N. Population Division. But this will be a very different kind of population growth than ever before — driven not by birth rates, which have plummeted around the world, but primarily by an increase in the number of elderly people. Indeed, the global population of children under 5 is expected to fall by 49 million as of midcentury, while the number of people over 60 will grow by 1.2 billion. How did the world grow so gray, so quickly?

One reason is that more people are living to advanced old age. But just as significant is the enormous bulge of people born in the first few decades after World War II. Both the United States and Western Europe saw particularly dramatic increases in birth rates during the late 1940s and 1950s, as returning veterans made up for lost time. In the 1960s and 1970s, much of the developing world also experienced a baby boom, but for a different reason: striking declines in infant and child mortality. As these global baby boomers age, they will create a population explosion of seniors. Today in the West, we are seeing a sharp uptick in people turning 60; in another 20 years, we’ll see an explosion in the numbers turning 80. Most of the rest of the world will follow the same course in the next few decades. …

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Steve Malanga, writing in WSJ, alerts us to the risks of states using Build America Bonds.

In a Rasmussen poll taken before the midterm election, half of the respondents said that members of Congress who supported the 2009 federal stimulus didn’t deserve to be re-elected. Many weren’t. Yet the lame-duck Congress might extend one of the key elements of that stimulus: “Build America Bonds” (BABs). States and municipalities have used these bonds to rack up some $160 billion in new debt over the last 19 months.

Build America Bonds were created to re-energize the municipal bond market, which contracted sharply in late 2008. Investors had become wary that the credit crunch would spread to municipals, as insurers who back state and local bonds got hurt in other markets and stopped insuring public debt. Facing declining tax revenue and growing deficits, some local governments suddenly couldn’t borrow.

The Obama administration responded with a new kind of taxable bond that offered a 35% federal subsidy on the interest rate. Washington designed the subsidy to appeal to investors such as pension funds and overseas buyers who don’t buy traditional municipal bonds because they can’t take advantage of their tax-free status. The federal subsidy allowed states and cities to offer these investors an attractive return. The catch: Congress authorized the program only through 2010, to allay concerns that BABs would become a permanent bailout.

States and cities jumped deeply into this new market. …

Weekly Standard has a piece calling for a protocol for states to enter bankruptcy.

Anyone who proposed even a decade ago that a state should be permitted to file for bankruptcy would have been dismissed as crazy. But times have changed. As Arnold Schwarze-negger’s plea for $7 billion of federal assistance for California earlier this year made clear, the states are the next frontier in “too big to fail.” In the topsy-turvy world we now inhabit, letting states file for bankruptcy to shed some of their obligations could save American taxpayers a great deal of money.

The financial mess that spendthrift states have gotten themselves into is well known. California—recently dubbed the “Lindsay Lohan of states” in the Wall Street Journal—has a deficit that could reach $25.4 billion next year, and Illinois’s deficit for the 2011 fiscal year may be in the neighborhood of $15 billion. There is little evidence that either state has a recipe for bringing down its runaway expenses, a large portion of which are wages and benefits owed to public employees. This means we can expect a major push for federal funds to prop up insolvent state governments in 2011, unless some miraculous alternative emerges to save the day. This is where bankruptcy comes in. …

Jonathan Tobin gives us some good news about ourselves.

… Despite the constant drumbeat of incitement from those extremists purporting to represent the interests of American Muslims, anti-Islamic hate crimes remain rare occurrences. The idea that anti-Muslim bigotry is a dominant theme in American society or that violent haters have disproportionately victimized believers in Islam is simply without foundation. And far from giving sanction to such bigotry, the hallmark of American discourse since 9/11 has been a conscious effort to disassociate Islam from the war being waged against the West by Islamist terrorists. The new statistics provide fresh proof that the claim of an anti-Muslim backlash is unfounded.

There is a new book out on the collapse of the New York Times. Daily Caller interviews the author.

William McGowan is the author of “Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Time Means For America.”

Formerly editor of the Washington Monthly, McGowan is a media fellow at Social Philosophy and Policy Center. His work has been published in the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and the National Review, among other places. His last book, “Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism,” won the National Press Club Award.

McGowan recently agreed to answer 10 questions from The Daily Caller about his new book:

When ship-owners want to get a stolen ship back who do they see? The Guardian interviews one candidate.

May 1987. The day after the Naruda had finished offloading its rice cargo in Haiti, armed guards boarded the freighter. Moments later the captain, Max Hardberger, had a grubby, badly photocopied piece of paper placed in his hands. “Pour les dettes,” the guard said.     

“What debts?” Hardberger asked.

The guard shrugged and said: “It’s a matter for the courts. In the meantime my men will remain on board.”

There were no debts, but that was beside the point. Haiti was a law unto itself; a place where court officials could be bought. And one clearly had been. The Naruda was about to be stolen from under Hardberger’s nose.

He played for time. He pumped the guards with booze and waited for dark before ordering his engineer to lock them into their cabin. It was a toss-up whether they would try to shoot their way out, but they were either too drunk or not being paid enough to bother. Hardberger started the engines, switched off all the lights and sneaked out of harbour. If they were spotted, the Naruda would be seized, and he’d be slung in jail. Only when he was in international waters could he relax. Hardberger called down to the guards. He offered to set them loose in a lifeboat or take them to Venezuela; the choice was theirs. They chose the lifeboat.

This event was the making of the man who looks a bit like a salty Hulk Hogan, whose life could be a Hollywood film and whose name is a scriptwriter’s dream. …

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David Harsanyi casts a gimlet eye towards the GM IPO.

Oh, good, the Obama administration has another imaginary victory for taxpayers to celebrate.

As you’ve probably heard, there’s quite a bit of hubbub surrounding the news that the administration’s car company is going public.

President Barack Obama tells us that General Motors’ IPO is proof that one of the toughest tales of recession “took another step to becoming a success story.” Not “survival,” but success. Taxpayers are going to make a profit, even!

Now, admittedly, success is a malleable concept. If by success we mean that General Motors still owes the government $43 billion — not including that piddling $15 billion it borrowed to fund its financial arm — with many analysts uncertain that it can ever flourish, we’re home free.

Success will mean temporarily setting aside the fact that the Treasury actually lost billions on the IPO as it “bought” GM stock at inflated prices. To break even on the freshly printed money taxpayers are “getting back” will probably mean GM needs to double in value over the next year to make us whole.

Do you feel whole? …

… But when we undermine the rule of law, ignore property rights, create moral hazards and destroy organic job growth to save a company that had been terribly managed long before the recession, no one should be bragging about success.

The Daily Caller has more.

If the federal government wanted to recoup its investment in GM, then the GM stock price should be much higher than the $33 initial price. In order to break even, as the Deal Journal reports, the stock price would have to rise to around $50 per share. So why is the Treasury Department selling off the company at a loss?

First, the government is what is known as a “motivated seller.” By offering such a low stock price, the administration is essentially admitting that it has no place in running an auto company. While GM’s financial position is much better than it was when it should have gone bankrupt, the company’s finances are not great. A quick crunch of any of the numbers in the GM prospectus shows the company is not the healthy organization the politicos would have you believe. They have done a poor job running the company, even if they did save it from going under by ignoring the law and throwing billions of dollars at it. The sale prospectus even admits “our (that is, the government’s) disclosure controls and procedures and our internal control over financial reporting are currently not effective.” Hardly a ringing endorsement!

Second, they’re not the only ones in the game. The unusual bankruptcy settlement for GM granted a significant portion of the company to the United Auto Workers. The union is in this game too, even though it has no investment to recoup. The UAW is selling around 18 million shares, so it stands to gain about $500 million for its pension fund — at taxpayers’ expense.

John Fund interviews Dick Armey who is in DC doing God’s work, fighting people like Trent Lott. 

An old Washington story goes that when Martians land near the White House, everyone inside the Beltway flees in terror. Everyone, that is, except for the folks at the favor-factories known as Congress’s Appropriations Committees, who rush to greet the spaceship and say, “We’re here to help with the transition.”

There is always a danger that this election’s invading aliens—aka, tea partiers—will gradually succumb to Beltway mores. Former GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, now a big-time Washington lobbyist, has already told the Washington Post that it’s imperative for his tribe to “co-opt” the tea partiers arriving in D.C.

But Dick Armey—Republican House majority leader for eight years following the GOP landslide of 1994 and now chairman of the influential advocacy group, FreedomWorks—is pointing them in the opposite direction. Mr. Armey’s organization has nurtured and mentored tea party candidates for the past 18 months. He helped promote the “Contract from America,” a 10-point, grass-roots inspired program to “re-limit” government that more than 70 new Senate and House members signed. And he’s sent each new member of Congress a seven-page memo on how not to be co-opted. …

With people like Joe Biden around him, Obama has no chance. Peter Wehner explains.

In an interview with GQ magazine, Vice President Biden, when asked about Barack Obama’s problem in being perceived as aloof, provided us with this answer: “I think what it is, is he’s so brilliant. He is an intellectual.”

Michael Gerson sums up Holder’s efforts as attorney general.

The closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison and civilian trials for terrorists were more than policy changes proposed by Barack Obama as a presidential candidate. They were presented as a return to constitutional government – a dividing line from an uncivilized past.

The indefinite detention of terrorists, according to Obama, had “destroyed our credibility when it comes to the rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment.” Testifying last year before Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder not only defended a New York trial for lead Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, he lectured, he taunted, he preened. Unlike others, he was not “scared” of what Mohammed would say at trial. Failure was “not an option.” This case, he told a reporter, would be “the defining event of my time as attorney general.”

Which it certainly has been. Under Holder’s influence, American detainee policy is a botched, hypocritical, politicized mess.

Jennifer Rubin and Linda Chavez try to warn off the GOP. Here’s Chavez;

Jen is right on both the substance and politics of a GOP move to revoke birthright citizenship from children born to illegal aliens. As I’ve written here and here, the 14th Amendment was carefully drawn and debated to exclude only two categories of persons: the children of diplomats and children born on Indian reservations that were deemed sovereign territories at the time.

But the political objections are even greater. Republicans lost two Senate seats — in Nevada and Colorado — that they should have won on Election Day, largely because of the nasty tenor of debate on illegal immigration. …

Shikhia Dalmia in “Whose Sari Now?” explains why the garment is rooted in Indian culture.

… Part of the Indian woman’s attachment to the sari no doubt stems from her cultural conditioning. Indian girls grow up wearing a mix of Indian garments (choli/lehnga, salwar/kamiz) and Western clothes (frocks, skirts, long dresses and jeans) — not saris. Saris are meant only for grown women who have fully come into their own. When a girl first wears one – typically at her school’s graduation or farewell party, the equivalent of prom night – it marks a rite of passage. The sari and all its resplendent accessories – glass bangles, chunky hand-crafted silver or gold jewelry, the bindi on the forehead – are their first full encounter with their femininity and, like a first love, it leaves an indelible impression.

But an Indian woman’s acculturation in the sari begins much before she actually wears one. Saris are an essential part of a bride’s trousseau that mothers sometimes start planning from the day a daughter is born. My mother had barely left the maternity ward when she decided that she would give me at least 21 silk saris when I got married. And, over the years, I witnessed her painstakingly assemble my collection with pieces from all over the country: rich, double-shaded benaresis; sumptuous tanchoies woven with strands of real gold; South Indian kanchiwarams whose bright magentas and fuchsias with contrasting borders are sadly out of fashion now; diaphanous, delicate chanderis; simple, weightless French chiffons in soothing pastels; Bengali kanthas whose elaborate embroidery depicts stories from ancient Hindu epics; and gorgeous, sumptuous tassars – my personal favorite – whose shine seems to come from an inner glow like the brides they often adorn. …

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Tony Blankley with a sober view of the reaction to the deficit commission’s report.

“If only we had sold our stocks a few weeks ago.” “If only I’d had the brakes checked before she drove up to the mountains.” There are few sadder words than those of regret at letting time pass until the catastrophe hits. Neither individuals nor armies nor nations are exempt from the human tendency to wait too long before acting – and paying a terrible price for the delay.

These thoughts, among others, have crossed my mind as I have watched politicians across the ideological spectrum react to the deficit commission’s report of last week.

Whatever substantive view of the proposal the various politicians had, I didn’t see a single senior player express the desire to take the report as an opportunity to throw all of our effort immediately into developing and passing a workable proposal into law. …

… Even as Greece, Spain and Ireland raise the specter of sovereign debt crises, even as France and Britain take bold action to bring their excessive spending under control (at the price of major street violence in their capital cities ) – American politicians focus on the general unacceptability of a proposal that includes anything that doesn’t quite fit their ideological predelictions. If they can’t have it exactly their way, they don’t want it at all. They are prepared to just coast forward at multitrillion-dollar yearly deficits, leaving only a string of condemnatory press releases in their wake. …

Abe Greenwald thinks Obama’s worst week ever has been going on since June. 

… Here’s a mordant laugh. On Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer said, “Every administration has a period where things just go haywire, nothing seems to go right. But I can’t recall a week like the Obama White House has had.” That was June 6, when Obama’s worst week was composed of lame PR attempts to deal with an oil spill that was not — at all — his fault. But clearly, as far back as June, the American people sensed that not all was well with the state of the country. The spill was convenient prey — and Barack Obama has scarcely had a week that easy since. What this really means is that our worst week ever has been going on for almost six months. This is a full season of collective uncertainty. With no reset on the horizon, the concept of worst is becoming infinitely elastic.

Joel Kotkin knows why the Dems got wiped. Their ideas suck.

Democrats are still looking for explanations for their stunning rejection in the midterms — citing everything from voting rights violations and Middle America’s racist orientation to Americans’ inability to perceive the underlying genius of President Barack Obama’s economic policy.

What they have failed to consider is the albatross of contemporary liberalism.

Liberalism once embraced the mission of fostering upward mobility and a stronger economy. But liberalism’s appeal has diminished, particularly among middle-class voters, as it has become increasingly control-oriented and economically cumbersome.

Today, according to most recent polling, no more than one in five voters call themselves liberal.

This contrasts with the far broader support for the familiar form of liberalism forged from the 1930s to the 1990s. Democratic presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton focused largely on basic middle-class concerns — such as expanding economic opportunity, property ownership and growth.

Modern-day liberalism, however, is often ambivalent about expanding the economy — preferring a mix of redistribution with redirection along green lines. Its base of political shock troops, public-employee unions, appears only tangentially interested in the health of the overall economy. …

Since there is almost universal condemnation, why is Bernanke doing QE2? WSJ Op-Ed has a suspicion.

… I have a different explanation for the Fed’s latest easing program: Without another $600 billion floating through the economy, Mr. Bernanke must believe that real estate (residential and commercial) would quickly drop, endangering banks.

The 2009 quantitative easing lowered mortgage rates and helped home prices rise for a while. But last month housing starts plunged almost 12%. And in September, according to Core-Logic, home prices dropped 2.8% from 2009. Commercial real estate values are driven by job-creation and vacancy rates, both of which are heading the wrong way.

Because of unexpectedly bad construction loans, the staid Wilmington Trust was sold to M&T Bank earlier this month in a rare “takeunder”—what Wall Street calls a deal done below a company’s stock value, in this case by 40%.

In other words, real estate is at risk again. But Mr. Bernanke would create a panic if he stated publicly that, if not for his magic dollar dust, real estate would fall off a cliff. …

Charles Krauthammer comments on TSA pat-downs.

Ah, the airport, where modern folk heroes are made. The airport, where that inspired flight attendant did what everyone who’s ever been in the spam-in-a-can crush of a flying aluminum tube – where we collectively pretend that a clutch of peanuts is a meal and a seat cushion is a “flotation device” – has always dreamed of doing: pull the lever, blow the door, explode the chute, grab a beer, slide to the tarmac and walk through the gates to the sanity that lies beyond. Not since Rick and Louis disappeared into the Casablanca fog headed for the Free French garrison in Brazzaville has a stroll on the tarmac thrilled so many.

Who cares that the crazed steward got arrested, pleaded guilty to sundry charges, and probably was a rude, unpleasant SOB to begin with? Bonnie and Clyde were psychopaths, yet what child of the ’60s did not fall in love with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty?

And now three months later, the newest airport hero arrives. His genius was not innovation in getting out, but deconstructing the entire process of getting in. John Tyner, cleverly armed with an iPhone to give YouTube immortality to the encounter, took exception to the TSA guard about to give him the benefit of Homeland Security’s newest brainstorm – the upgraded, full-palm, up the groin, all-body pat-down. In a stroke, the young man ascended to myth, or at least the next edition of Bartlett’s, warning the agent not to “touch my junk.” …

According to CNet News, one typical human brain has more switches than all computers on earth.

… Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have spent the past few years engineering a new imaging model, which they call array tomography, in conjunction with novel computational software, to stitch together image slices into a three-dimensional image that can be rotated, penetrated and navigated. Their work appears in the journal Neuron this week. …

… They found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study:

“One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.” …

Licking off the humor section is a feel good story from the editors of Investor’s Business Daily.

As the case for global warming and cap-and-trade has collapsed, so too has the market that was to exploit this manufactured crisis for fun and profit. The climate-change bubble has burst.

Lost in the hubbub leading up to the Republican and Tea Party tsunami on Nov. 2 was the collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). But its implications for the future of the American economy and the business climate are staggering: It is an acknowledgment that both the case for climate trade and cap-and-tax legislation has also collapsed. …

… The biggest losers are CCX’s two biggest investors, Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and Goldman Sachs, that champion of sound money management that serves as the farm team for administration staffing. …