Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Peter Wehner reviews possible explanations for Obama’s condescension.

…The president is also, consciously or not, creating a narrative to explain the defeat he and his party are about to be administered. The reasons are multiple — from the latent bigotry and racism of the Tea Party movement, to the lies of the GOP, to foreign-money corruption our politics, to the inability of the voting public to think clearly.

All this is nonsense, of course – and, for Obama, it is self-destructive. All of us, including political leaders, experience hardships and setbacks in life. In order to succeed, we need to respond to them in a way that is both honest and intelligent. And for that to happen, we need to see things as they are. We need to be grounded enough, and humble enough, to comprehend errors of our making. That is the sine qua non for adjusting to new facts and circumstances and to interpreting experiences in a way that will be beneficial.

President Obama seems almost incapable of such a thing. Rather, he is busily constructing an alternate reality. He is choosing to live in a world that begins with “Once upon a time.”

The president of the United States, it appears, can’t handle the truth. He and his party will suffer mightily because of is. So, alas, will our country.

Even Dems see that Obama does not learn from his mistakes. In Newsweek, Mickey Kaus worries that Obama will not be able to adjust.

Uh-oh. President Obama seems to have learned nothing from the disaster of the “cling-to-guns-and-God” talk that almost derailed his campaign in 2008. He’s back at it—blaming voters for failing to “think clearly” because they’re “scared” about the economy…

…JustOneMinute suggests, mockingly, that this is an improvement over Obama’s 2008 “cling” speech because

now Obama’s critics are scared rather than racist or stupid. There’s hope for us!

…Now I’m scared! What yesterday’s comments suggest isn’t just that Obama will get clobbered in the midterms. It suggests that after he gets clobbered he won’t be able to adjust and turn the setback into a longterm victory the way Bill Clinton did. Clinton reacted to his 1994 midterm loss by acknowledging his opponents’ strongest arguments and pursuing a balanced budget and welfare reform. Obama seems more inclined to just tough it out until the economy recovers and the scared, confused voters become unscared and see the light. Meanwhile, he’ll spend his time in a protective cocoon. …

John Steele Gordon has excellent commentary on Rich Lowry’s article about economic growth in Texas.

…It is often pointed out that the states make great laboratories for political-science experiments. And an experiment has been underway for quite a while testing the liberal model — high taxes, extensive regulation, many government-provided social services, union-friendly laws — against the conservative model — low taxes, limited regulation and social services, right-to-work laws. The results are increasingly in. As Rich Lowry reports in National Review Online, the differences between California and Texas are striking. Between August 2009 and August 2010, the nation created a net of 214,000 jobs. Texas created more than half of them, 119,000. California lost 112,000 jobs in that period. …

…And people have been voting with their feet: A thousand people a day are moving to Texas. It will likely gain four House seats next year, while California for the first time since it became a state in 1850 will gain none. …

And Jennifer Rubin points out that California and Texas have comparable illegal immigrant numbers.

John, your apt analysis got me thinking again about the impact of immigration, including illegal immigration, on California’s declining fortunes. As I wrote earlier this month, there is ample evidence that illegal immigration is not a significant factor in California’s woes. Your analysis sent me back to some data on the influx of illegal immigrants into two states — California and Texas — with radically different economic results.

It turns out that Texas has nearly as big an issue with illegal immigration as California. A September 2010 Pew study has these tidbits:

Unauthorized immigrants accounted for 3.7% of the nation’s population in 2009. Their shares of states’ total population were highest in California (6.9%), Nevada (6.8%) and Texas (6.5%). … California had the largest number (1.8 million) of unauthorized immigrants in the 2009 labor force, and they made up a larger share of the labor force there (9.3%) than in any other state except Nevada (9.4%). Texas had an estimated 1 million unauthorized immigrants in the labor force in 2009, which represented 8.7% of the labor force.

In other words, the sharply divergent economic policies and political environments of the two states have much to do with their radically different economic outputs; illegal immigration appears to be negligible factor.

In NRO, Rich Lowry reports on economic growth in Texas. The state government’s restraint has given the phrase “Don’t mess with Texas” a new meaning.

…According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 214,000 net new jobs were created in the United States from August 2009 to August 2010. Texas created 119,000 jobs during the same period. If every state in the country had performed as well, we’d have created about 1.5 million jobs nationally during the past year, and maybe “stimulus” wouldn’t be such a dirty word.

What does Austin know that Washington doesn’t? At its simplest: Don’t overtax and -spend, keep regulations to a minimum, avoid letting unions and trial lawyers run riot…

…During the past 12 months, California nearly canceled out Texas’s job creation all by itself, losing 112,000 net jobs. …

Texas is a model of governmental restraint. In 2008, state and local expenditures were 25.5 percent of GDP in California, 22.8 in the U.S., and 17.3 in Texas. Back in 1987, levels of spending were roughly similar in these places. The recessions of 1991 and 2001 spiked spending everywhere, but each time Texas fought to bring it down to pre-recession levels. “Because of this policy decision,” the Texas Public Policy Foundation report notes, “Texas’ 2008 spending burden remained slightly below its 1987 levels — a major accomplishment.”

Less spending means lower taxes. Texas doesn’t have an income tax — in contrast to California’s highly progressive income tax — and it is among the 10 lowest-tax states in the country. Its regulatory burden is low across the board, and it’s a right-to-work state that enacted significant tort reform in the middle of the last decade. …

David Harsanyi asks what’s up with feminists.

…As you’ve heard, nepotism’s never-ending gift to California — the nation, really — Jerry Brown, is in a tight gubernatorial race against Republican Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO. In leaked audio tapes, a Brown campaign aide is heard mulling over the pros and cons of using the word “whore,” and no one challenges him.

It’s time to release that righteous feminist anger, right, sisters? No?

Perhaps these days the word “whore” is more accepted as a gender-neutral definition of politician. I leave these linguistic questions to you. The National Organization for Women wasn’t too offended and endorsed Brown only a day after we learned about the incident. And even if the entire Brown brouhaha is overblown politics — and, actually, I think it is — you can’t help but wonder if a Republican would ever survive a similar scandal.

…Admittedly, I comprehend precious little about women. Yet, it remains a mystery to me why more women aren’t offended that a small group defines what real “women’s issues” are, or dictates to everyone which words and ideas they should all find offensive. …

Rich Lowry posted an open letter to the Ohio Democrat Party Chairman in the Corner. The opening alone will make you want to read more.

Chris Redfern, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic party who famously called the tea partiers “f******,” has attacked one of our bloggers. My letter in response follows:

Dear Chairman Redfern,

I hesitate to take your time with a missive like this because I know you are busy losing a governorship, a Senate seat, and conceivably as many as six House seats in the great state of Ohio. Managing such a massive political failure can’t be easy, so I don’t want to do anything to distract you from it. …

Michael Barone wonders how the Dems who changed their votes on Obamacare are faring in their campaigns.

…To put these numbers in perspective, it’s highly unusual for an incumbent House member to trail a challenger in any poll or to run significantly below 50 percent. But these three Democrats are running 5 to 10 points behind Republican challengers and none tops 40 percent.

…Stupak promptly announced he was retiring after 18 years. Republican Dan Benishek is currently leading there by an average of 44 to 27 percent in five polls.

Two of the Stupak five, freshmen Steve Driehaus of Ohio 1 and Kathy Dahlkemper of Pennsylvania 3, are in dreadful shape. Driehaus trails by an average 51 to 41 percent in his Cincinnati area district; Dahlkemper trails by an average of 45 to 37 percent in her Erie area seat.

Another two are from West Virginia. Alan Mollohan, first elected in 1982, lost in the May primary; Nick Joe Rahall, first elected in 1976, won his primary and seems well ahead for November. …

In the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz is just as confused as the rest of the Liberals, but he does appear to understand that blaming the voters isn’t a viable strategy.

…On the merits, journalists are right that Obama’s accomplishments have been minimized. Health care reform, however it pans out, was a huge achievement; the overall package remains unpopular, the individual parts (such as not excluding kids for preexisting conditions) not so much. Tightening financial regulation was a heavy lift against the forces of Wall Street. Even the much-derided stimulus law saved plenty of jobs.

All that has been overshadowed because many voters believe the president bobbled the economy while setting his sights on social engineering. But here, too, the short attention span of today’s journalism played a role. The health care and banking battles were covered ad nauseum, but once they passed, the press lost interest and moved on to mosque mess and the Koran-burning preacher and whatever other diversions were available.

The biggest media blunder, in my view, was the walk-on-water coverage that Obama drew in 2007 and 2008. The only real debate was whether he was more like FDR (Time) or Lincoln (Newsweek). The candidate obviously played a role in creating his own myth, but it was the breathless media that sent expectations soaring into the stratosphere. Once Obama had to grapple with two wars, a crippled economy and reflexive Republican opposition, he had no place to go but down. The press has long since fallen out of love with the president, but the overheated hyperbole did him no favors.

Who’s to blame for the coming electoral tsunami? We ought to be careful about dumping on the most convenient scapegoat, those moronic voters. In politics, it’s not that complicated: you either deliver or you pay the price.

Jillian Melchior writes that the political defeats in D.C. school reform may be an opening for a bigger reform movement, in Commentary.

School-reform champions Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee put the pressure on D.C.’s next mayor this weekend with a dead-on op-ed in the Washington Post. There’s a justified perception that teachers’ unions are a political force to be reckoned with. But despite their recent electoral loss, famed reformers like Rhee and Fenty have opened the opportunity for parents and their children to become an entity to be feared, too.

…interest in school reform appears on the rise, and a large percentage of the public supports holding teachers accountable and taking a stand against the unions that allow bad teachers to hold on to their jobs, raises, and benefits at the expense of American children.

Among the most interesting of these recent developments is the buzz surrounding the documentary Waiting for Superman, which has pointed a public finger at the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. But interest in genuine reform extends beyond the film. Want statistical proof? The latest Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll reported that 72 percent of public-school parents wanted teachers to be paid “on the basis of his or her work.” A September Time poll also revealed a public that would favor Rhee and Fenty’s approach; 66 percent opposed tenure for public-school teachers; 71 percent wanted to establish merit pay; and a plurality thought teachers’ unions kept schools from improving. Also worth examination is the survey conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and Education Next, which shows a markedly pro-reform attitude.

Rhee and Fenty may no longer be in office, but here’s hoping they remain in the spotlight. Across the country, the political mood is surly and dissatisfied, but what reformers like the Tea Partiers have too often lacked is an articulate and experienced figurehead to organize behind. Fenty’s defeat and Rhee’s resignation may open up a bigger political opportunity. Whereas before, Rhee and Fenty were empowered to affect reform only in D.C., influencing the rest of the country by example, now they have the opportunity to become the voice of a national school-reform movement.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

In the WSJ, Mark Helprin reminds us of the slowly tightening vise that grips Israel. Netanyahu has been wise to wait before striking until the president is rebuked by voters. But then, he must act. 

… Partly as a result of the steady development of Saudi air power in response to Iraq and Iran, Israel’s potential antagonists are closing the gap in numbers and quality, and the Israeli Air Force does not offer the same margin of safety that once it did. With the Arabs’ approaching 1.3/1 advantage in first-line aircraft, 2.9/1 in second-line aircraft, and an enormous 12/1 advantage in mobile air defense, many new options open if Arab unity coalesces as it did prior to the three major Arab- Israeli wars, in all of which Israel’s existence was at stake and the result unpredictable. If Turkey is included, as it might be, Israel’s prospects become seriously darker.

Other than a direct nuclear strike, what it most has to fear is that a combination of states will throw all their aircraft against it at once while advancing a surface-to-air-missile umbrella to threaten Israeli planes and provide sanctuary for its own. Though the Israeli Air Force is qualitatively superior and its imaginative responses cannot be counted out, the steadily improving professionalism of the Arab air forces, their first rate American and European equipment, their surface-to-air-missile shield, and most importantly their mass, are potentially a mortal threat. For if the Israeli Air Force is sufficiently degraded, Israel’s prospects on the ground will follow proportionately.

In light of the fact that the conventional balance can change and is changing, one of the many purposes of Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons is not merely to wait for a lucky shot at Tel Aviv but to neutralize Israel’s nuclear deterrent so as to allow a series of conventional battles to advance Israel’s downfall incrementally. …

David Harsanyi makes fun of the White House campaign machine gone awry. Perhaps they misunderstood the concept of October surprise.

So who’s left to demonize? The Girl Scouts? Rotary Clubs, maybe?

…A recent ad by Democrats makes the charge — dutifully echoed through the blogosphere and by talking heads — that the Chamber was part of a cabal out to “steal our democracy,” accepting foreign cash and then using the funds to campaign against candidates on the left. Though, admittedly, they have no proof of any wrongdoing, Democrats have threatened that investigations will soon uncover this reprehensible criminal activity.

…”Stealing democracy,” as you may know, loosely translated, means: Holy crap, Republicans are going to win an election.

…If the United States Chamber of Commerce — composed of some of the most moderate, milquetoast, government- friendly saps in the country — are now on the Enemies List, who exactly does the president think is reasonable? If the crony capitalists aren’t good enough for Barack Obama, who is? …

Craig Pirrong hopes that Obama keeps insulting the electorate.

No, seriously:

‘At a Saturday-evening fundraiser held in the home of a wealthy Massachusetts hospital executive, President Obama suggested Democrats are having difficulties in midterm campaigning because Americans simply aren’t thinking clearly. … “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” Obama told the assembled Democrats, who paid $15,200 a person to attend. “And the country is scared.”…

The mind boggles.  It’s hard to know whether he believes this or not, or which alternative is worse.  Let’s consider.  Doesn’t believe it: we have  president who’s willing to heap slurs on the emotional balance of those disenchanted with him to rationalize his political nosedive.  Believes it: we have a delusional president who is so invested in his Olympian self-image that he is incapable of responding to feedback that screams that he’s careened off course, and actually believes that diagnosing vast swathes of America as emotionally crippled PTSD victims is a winning political pitch.

Whatever the explanation, I hope he sticks with it.  The more he condescends, the lower his fortunes, and those of his party, will descend.

Jennifer Rubin also criticizes the complainer in chief.

Mickey Kaus considers Obama’s outbursts against the electorate to be “a form of political malpractice—making yourself look good to supporters, and to history, and to yourself, at the expense of the fellow Dems who are on the ballot.” But this is vintage Obama. It is always about him and his inability to reconcile his own self-image with the results he has achieved and the reaction he engenders. …

…he reverts to partisan sniping, at times sounding rather loopy:

“He swiped repeatedly at Republicans, invoking Abraham Lincoln at one point and positing that the 16th president would have trouble winning the Republican nomination if he were a candidate today.”

Because the modern GOP is in favor of slavery? Because, well … oh forget it. Even his insults are incoherent these days.

Obama has proved to be weak in a crisis, as Juan Williams candidly observed in June. He’s wasn’t up to the BP oil spill or terrorist attacks. And he’s not very good at managing his own political crisis. I suppose teaching law school, perpetually running for higher office, and writing semi-fictional books about himself weren’t the best preparation for the presidency.

Ed Morrissey picks up on an astounding piece. Obama has been piling it high when discussing shovel-ready projects, and David Brooks had this from the President’s mouth a year ago.

And of course, this wouldn’t have been news all the time while Barack Obama kept claiming that these “shovel ready jobs” had prosperity just around the corner, right?  Brooks says that the admission came in an off-the-record session with the President, which kept him from reporting it.  I wonder if Brooks or anyone else would have been that particular had George Bush admitted “off the record” that he knew Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction in 2003 or 2004, while continuing to make the argument that the war was necessary because of them.  What happened to sourcing as “a senior administration official”?  Did it not occur to Brooks that Obama was lying about these jobs over the past year to defend his economic policies, and that Brooks might have had a responsibility to make that known?  Good to know that the New York Times prints all the news that fits — its agenda. …

Michelle Malkin also comments on shovel-gate and Brooks giving up his journalistic cred for the object of his political affection.

How much of a tool is New York Times columnist David Brooks?

This much: On the PBS NewsHour last night, Brooks admitted that President Obama told him a year ago that he knew that the “shovel-ready project” propaganda he employed to pass the massive porkulus bill was a steaming load of bullcrap.

Brooks’ New York Times colleague Peter Baker reported the newsworthy admission in an upcoming Sunday magazine piece. It’s an admission that received much deserved attention here in the blogosphere this week and that invited much deserved derision from Republican critics of the stimulus boondoggle.

Why didn’t Brooks report Obama’s damning admission sooner? In another serving of steaming bullcrap, he claims it’s because Baker was more skilled at getting Obama to talk on the record. Seems to me the real reason Brooks didn’t report it is because he had his nose so far up his bromance love object’s you-know-what that he didn’t see the scoop dropped right in his lap. …

In the Washington Examiner, Linda Chavez explains that the president’s ignorance and irresponsibility is being funded by taxpayers.

…When entrepreneurs fail, they’ve lost their own money and that of investors who have freely chosen to take the risk.

Government programs, however, play with other people’s money — since government has no money of its own. When government programs fail, the consequences aren’t born by the people making the decisions but by the taxpayers.

So when Obama finally realizes there’s no such thing as a shovel-ready project, he’s admitting he’s wasted our money — billions of dollars — not his own. But his only answer is to raise taxes so he can spend yet more. It’s the kind of thinking that dooms his presidency and our economy.

In Der Spiegel, Matthias Schulz writes how a genetic mutation, lactose tolerance, affected the demographics of ancient Europeans. Schulz explains how archaeologists think that the first milk drinkers of Europe originated in the Middle East, but started drinking milk after a genetic mutation occurred when the culture had migrated to central Europe.

New research has revealed that agriculture came to Europe amid a wave of immigration from the Middle East during the Neolithic period. The newcomers won out over the locals because of their sophisticated culture, mastery of agriculture — and their miracle food, milk. …

In a bid to solve the mystery, molecular biologists have sawed into and analyzed countless Neolithic bones. The breakthrough came last year, when scientists discovered that the first milk drinkers lived in the territory of present-day Austria, Hungary and Slovakia.

…The beginnings can now be delineated relatively well. About 12,000 years ago, the zone between the Zagros Mountains in present-day Iran, Palestine and Turkey was transformed into a giant field experiment.

…Oddly enough, the Mesopotamian farmers didn’t touch fresh milk. A few weeks ago, Joachim Burger returned from Turkey with a sack full of Neolithic bones from newly discovered cemeteries where the ancient farmers were buried.

When the bones were analyzed, there were no signs of lactose tolerance. “If these people had drunk milk, they would have felt sick,” says Burger. This means that at first the farmers only consumed fermented milk products like kefir, yogurt and cheese, which contain very little lactose. …

…As a result of “accelerated evolution,” says Burger, lactose tolerance was selected for on a large scale within the population in the space of about 100 generations. …

…The new food was especially beneficial for children. In the Neolithic Age, many small children died after being weaned in their fourth year of life. “As a result of consuming healthy milk, this could be greatly reduced,” Hamburg biologist Fritz Höffeler speculates. All of this led to population growth and, as a result, further geographical expansion. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

At the Campaign Spot at NRO, Jim Geraghty blogs about a speech he gave about the change that is coming.

From the Jolt . . . where if you subscribed, I wouldn’t have to tease you with an excerpt each morning:

Jim’s Rant at AU

The following is more or less the chat I gave at American University last night, with our old friend Byron York and a name you’ve seen in these parts regularly, Patrick Ruffini.

***

So what’s going to happen on Election Day?

Usually when you’re talking about wave elections, you compare it to some massive natural disaster. It’s a landslide. It’s a tsunami. It’s a political earthquake.

We’re now in the territory where we need some new terms. Perhaps we can call it ‘Political Climate Change.’ “Mass Extinction Event” seems to cover it. For a lot of Democrats opening the ballot box is going to feel like opening the Ark of the Covenant, complete with heads exploding and faces melting. Instead of provoking the Wrath of God, they’ve provoked the Wrath of the Electorate.

Start with the Gallup generic ballot numbers. As Republicans, we’re used to rooting for a tie. Usually, if Republicans are down by 3 or less, they feel pretty good. If it’s a tie, Republicans feel like they’re set to have a really good year. “Ahead by 17” isn’t really on the usual scale. You’re left tapping the screen and asking if it could possibly be right. …

Tony Blankley comments that recent White House staff replacements signal the president is going to double down on stupid..

…Based on the recent appointments of the two most powerful staff positions in the White House, it appears that the White House is descending deeper into the bunker in anticipation of the expected shift in congressional majorities next year. The selection of Pete Rouse for chief of staff and Tom Donilon for national security adviser are both in-house promotions. Moving deputies up to principal rank is more typically seen in the seventh and eighth years of a White House administration – when an administration often has lost its instinct for innovation and creative responses to changing events. Moreover, in each case, a senior figure is being replaced with a staffer. Rahm Emanuel was a congressman who was in the senior leadership of the Democratic House when he became chief of staff. Gen. James L. Jones had been supreme allied commander in Europe and four-star commandant of the Marine Corps before he became national security adviser last year.

Mr. Donilon and Mr. Rouse – both with good careers as staffers – have never held a principal position. They may well rise to the occasion – even as Gen. Jones seemed to descend at his White House occasion – but they start in the hole as major political forces in their own rights. Worse, they both are known as political Mr. Fixits rather than serious policy players, being more suited for executing presidential orders than helping the president see and move toward different strategic visions of his presidency.

Evidence of this emerging bunker mentality was compounded when the president said on a radio show last week that if the GOP wins in November, it will be hand-to-hand combat next year.

…As Politico reported over the weekend: “No matter how bad things get, Rouse and Obama have no plans to break up the small group of campaign veterans who surround the president – nor are they likely to bring in the outsiders many Democrats think the White House sorely needs.” …

In the Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden follows up on the Clinton rumors.

…Bill’s energetic reappearance on the campaign trail comes just as rumours, some of them eagerly fuelled by the Clinton camp, swirl that Hillary might replace the hapless Joe Biden as Obama’s vice-presidential running mate in 2012 or even challenge the President for the Democratic nomination if his popularity continues to slide.

Neither option makes much sense for Hillary, whose performance as Secretary of State, in which she has been supportive of the US military and sought to stiffen Obama’s spine in Afghanistan, has won admirers even on the Right.

Becoming vice-president would tie her to Obama on domestic policy. Through political good fortune (not to mention calculation), she has been out of that arena for the past two years, meaning that there are no Clinton fingerprints on unpopular health care, bail-out or stimulus legislation. …

In Popular Mechanics, Erin McCarthy interviews C.J. Shivers about his new book, The Gun: The AK-47 and the Evolution of War.

…Why did the Soviet Union think a lightweight, automatic rifle was needed?  

The Soviet military had faced the world’s first mass-produced assault rifle—the German sturmgewehr, or storm rifle—in battles on the Eastern Front in World War II. It was impressed and wanted its own version. The AK-47 was fundamentally a conceptual copy of the German weapon. The Soviet Union was exceptionally skilled at copying its enemies’ ideas and was proud of its espionage and intelligence successes in obtaining enemy equipment and grasping the significance and utility of its opponents’ gear. In this case, it wanted an equivalent: a compact rifle, with modest recoil and weight, that could be fired on automatic or semiautomatic and that used smaller ammunition than the rifles of its time. Some people think of the Kalashnikov as revolutionary in design and idea, but it was evolutionary. In hindsight, it marked a natural step in a progression that had been under way for decades—a weapon midway between the large rifles and small submachine guns of the era, the ultimate compromise arm. This had many benefits, including that because the weapon used lighter, lower-powered ammunition, it would be less expensive to manufacture and supply and less burdensome, and each soldier could carry more cartridges per combat load. It all made military sense, and the Soviet arms-design community understood this immediately and went to work on its conceptual knockoff of the pre-existing German arm. …

…How did the AK become so widely disseminated, and what about it made it such a ripe candidate for dissemination? 

One common misperception is that the AK-47 is reliable and effective, therefore it is abundant. This is not really the case. The weapon’s superabundance, its near ubiquity, is related less to its performance than to the facts of its manufacture. Once it was designated a standard Eastern Bloc arm, it was assembled and stockpiled in planned economies whether anyone paid for or wanted the rifles or not. This led to an uncountable accumulation of the weapons. And once the weapons existed, they moved. Had the weapon not been hooked up to the unending output of the planned economy, it would have been a much less significant device. If it had been invented in Liechtenstein, you might have never even heard of it.  …

Marty Peretz tells Carter to get a life.

I remember Ted Kennedy announcing his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president in 1980. It was an unusual candidacy because there was already a Democrat in the White House and he intended to run for a second a term. That president was Jimmy Carter, poor man. Poor haughty man.

…Now, the then incumbent president Carter has written another apologia, mawkish and arrogant at once. It is called White House Diary, and it has received near zero currency.  But it puts the blame for his loss on Teddy.  Not only that: Jimmy puts the blame for the defeat of his health care legislation on Teddy, too.

…Carter lost because inflation was above 10%, and unemployment was close to 7.5%, and you couldn’t get gasoline at the gas station. Moreover, our diplomatic personnel were still in captivity after a year in Tehran. And Carter himself had declared the country in spiritual crisis…and it was, because of him.

…And I? For whom did I vote. Ronald Reagan. Anybody was better than Carter. And anybody still is.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Spengler explores several facets of Iran’s computer security problems.

Amid the mass of published analysis of the Stuxnet virus, Iran’s most obvious vulnerability to cyber-war has drawn little comment: much of the Islamic Republic runs on pirated software. The programmers who apparently cracked Siemens’ industrial control code to plant malware in Iran’s nuclear facilities needed a high degree of sophistication. Most Iranian computers, though, run on stolen software obtained from public servers sponsored by the Iranian government. It would require far less effort to bring about a virtual shutdown of computation in Iran, and the collapse of the Iranian economy. …

…Even the software that the Iranian authorities use to block Internet access is apparently stolen. Wikipedia reports, “The primary engine of Iran’s censorship is the content-control software SmartFilter, developed by San Jose firm Secure Computing. However, Secure denies ever having sold the software to Iran, and alleges that Iran is illegally using the software without a license.”

…A country that steals its software cannot build its own, even if the sort of individual who excels at software development wanted to live in Iran. Most of those who can, leave. A 2002 study reported that four out of five Iranians who received rewards in international science competitions subsequently left Iran; too few Iranians have won international awards since then to gather comparable data. In 2006, the International Monetary Fund noted that Iran had the worst brain drain of 90 countries surveyed.

Iran has so few skilled programmers that it could be that the security services do not have the capacity to distinguish sabotage from incompetence. That may explain why Tehran blames foreign intelligence services for a recent succession of economic reverses, including the near-collapse of the local markets for gold and foreign exchange. …

In Reason, Nick Gillespie doesn’t think, judging by their past performance, Republicans will stop the spending.

More signs that the economy is sluggish and that the American Century is over for real:

The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the deficit for the 2010 budget year that ended Sept. 30 will total $1.29 trillion. That’s down by $125 billion from the $1.4 trillion in 2009 – the highest deficit on record.

But don’t worry, America. The political class is dedicated to keeping America’s record-setting-deficit record going:

The Obama administration is projecting that the deficit for the 2011 budget year, which began on Oct. 1, will climb to $1.4 trillion. Over the next decade, it will total $8.47 trillion.

And they’ve even got a secret weapon up their sleeve to make sure this happens: The imminent election of large numbers of Republicans who played such a key role in the massive 104 percent increase in inflation-adjusted government spending during the George W. Bush administration (which was signing the checks for most of FY2009). …

Michael Barone comments on Democrat desperation.

…Back in January, the president attacked the Supreme Court for ruling that corporations and unions have First Amendment speech rights and pointed to the possibility that foreigners might try to influence American election outcomes. Now he and his spokesmen on the campaign trail and on Sunday interview programs are charging that outfits like the Chamber of Commerce are smuggling foreign money into the campaign.

Their evidence? Well, there isn’t much, as even the New York Times, Washington Post and factcheck.org agree.

The smoking gun? The Chamber of Commerce collects $100,000 in membership dues from foreigners out of a $200,000,000 operating budget and spends some of that budget on campaign ads. But Obama uberadviser David Axelrod says it’s up to the chamber to prove it’s innocent.

There are a couple of odd things here. One is that the 2008 Obama campaign, by deliberately not using the address verification software most enterprises use to determine it’s really your credit card, took in a lot more illegal foreign money than its rivals. The Obama folks may be projecting their own sins on their opponents. …

Ken Langone writes that he couldn’t have successfully started Home Depot in the current business climate.  He writes this in an open letter to the President in the WSJ.

…A little more than 30 years ago, Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, Pat Farrah and I got together and founded The Home Depot. Our dream was to create (memo to DNC activists: that’s build, not take or coerce) a new kind of home-improvement center catering to do-it-yourselfers. The concept was to have a wide assortment, a high level of service, and the lowest pricing possible.

…If we tried to start Home Depot today, under the kind of onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it’s a stone cold certainty that our business would never get off the ground, much less thrive. Rules against providing stock options would have prevented us from incentivizing worthy employees in the start-up phase—never mind the incredibly high cost of regulatory compliance overall and mandatory health insurance. Still worse are the ever-rapacious trial lawyers.

…I stand behind no one in my enthusiasm and dedication to improving our society and especially our health care. It’s worth adding that it makes little sense to send Treasury checks to high net-worth people in the form of Social Security. That includes you, me and scores of members of Congress. Why not cut through that red tape, Mr. President, and apply a basic means test to that program? Just make sure that money actually reduces federal spending and isn’t simply shifted elsewhere. I guarantee you that many millionaires and billionaires will gladly forego it—as my wife and I already do when we forward those checks each month to charity.

It’s not too late to include the voices of experienced business people in your efforts, small business owners in particular. Americans would be right to wonder why you haven’t already.

George Will looks beyond winning Congressional seats.

…After November, Republican eyes will turn to the prize of the presidency in 2012. Concerning which, McConnell sees cautionary lessons from three other years — 1946, 1954 and 1994.

In 1946, President Truman’s party lost control of both the House and Senate. In 1948, however, Truman won an improbable reelection running against the “do-nothing 80th Congress.” In 1954, President Eisenhower’s party lost control of the House and Senate. But two years later, Eisenhower was resoundingly reelected. In 1994, President Clinton’s party lost control of the House and Senate. In 1996, Clinton cruised to reelection, partly because of reckless behavior — e.g., the government shutdown of 1995 — by congressional Republicans.

Regarding House races, Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard notes that the Democratic Party has “an inefficiently distributed base of voters.” It “consists mostly of union workers, upscale urban liberals, and minority voters, many of whom are clustered in highly Democratic districts.” In many other districts, Democratic candidates depend on “independents and soft partisans,” the very voters who have defected from the Obama coalition of 2008.

…On Nov. 2, there will be 37 gubernatorial elections. On Wednesday, Nov. 3, when the 15-month dash to the Iowa caucuses begins, Republicans may be savoring gains of eight or more governors, to a total of at least 31. They also may have gained 500 seats in state legislatures, mostly by retaking seats lost in the last two elections. This would expand Republican power over the redistricting that will be based on the 2010 census. Polidata Inc. estimates that states carried in 2008 by John McCain will gain a net of seven seats (and electoral votes) and that states Barack Obama carried will lose seven. …

We have NRO shorts. Here are two:

While the Tea Party has been reading Atlas Shrugged and The Road to Serfdom, Alaska’s Joe Miller and West Virginia’s John Raese, Senate candidates both, apparently have been boning up on their Milton Friedman: Each has had intelligent and sober things to say about the minimum wage, which decades of economic analysis has shown to increase unemployment among the poor and unskilled, and which Friedman called “the most anti-black law on the books,” noting its exacerbation of joblessness among African Americans. Their Democratic opponents are howling, of course, never having quite got their heads around the fact that in their elementary economics textbooks, demand curves slope downward: The higher the price of x, the less x is demanded. Mr. Miller, a Yale law graduate who takes a narrow view of federal power, believes that Washington lacks the legitimate authority to impose a minimum wage on the states, while Mr. Raese has made the economically obvious point that an artificial wage floor will foreclose job opportunities for certain workers. American public policy is currently in the grip of three lifelong politicians without a milligram of business experience or economic acumen between them — lawyer Barack Obama, lawyer Harry Reid, and congressional heiress Nancy Pelosi — and it shows. When it comes to economics, Democrats are as reliably anti-science as flat-earthers trying to explain away evolution, and their dinosaur policies are long overdue for extinction.

Geert Wilders has made his career in the Netherlands on a group of related propositions: There are more than enough Muslims in the country, their Koran is a fascist book like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and the time has come to protect Dutch culture. A lot of Dutch people share these opinions. Five years ago Wilders founded the Freedom party, and in the recent general elections the party won 24 seats in a parliament of 150. Dutch politics are splintered. Two other conservative parties need the support of Wilders if they are to form a coalition government. Discussions are continuing while Wilders stands trial on the grounds that he has been “inciting hatred” against Muslims. He could be fined and sent to prison. Jan Moors, one of the judges in the case, has accused him of being “good at making statements, but then you avoid the discussion.” Critics, and Muslims among them, make out that Wilders is some sort of fascist, and he replies that he is an elected parliamentarian speaking for all his fellow citizens and exercising his right of free speech. What’s at issue is whether Muslims are to have special privileges enshrined in law, and it is no exaggeration to say that the future far beyond the Netherlands hangs on it.

A review in the WSJ of a new book on the contest between Hitler and Stalin. The title is Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Reminds Pickerhead of some lines from a poem by Anna Akhmatova; “She loves, loves blood. This Russian Earth.” She penned that in 1921 before anybody had any idea the number of people Stalin would kill. 

… Among his other goals in “Bloodlands,” Mr. Snyder attempts to put the Holocaust in context—to restore it, in a sense, to the history of the wider European conflict. This is a task that no historian can attempt without risking controversy. Yet far from minimizing Jewish suffering, “Bloodlands” gives a fuller picture of the Nazi killing machine. Auschwitz, which wasn’t purely a “death camp,” lives on in our memory due in large part to those who lived to tell the tale. Through his access to Eastern European sources, Mr. Snyder also takes the reader to places like Babi Yar, Treblinka and Belzec. These were Nazi mass-murder sites that left virtually no survivors.

Yet Mr. Snyder’s book does make it clear that Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the purge of European Jewry, was not a fully original idea. A decade before, Stalin had set out to annihilate the Ukrainian peasant class, whose “national” sentiments he perceived as a threat to his Soviet utopia. The collectivization of agriculture was the weapon of choice. Implemented savagely, collectivization brought famine. In the spring of 1933 people in Ukraine were dying at a rate of 10,000 per day.

Stalin then turned on other target groups in the Soviet Union, starting with the kulaks—supposedly richer farmers, whom Stalin said needed to be “liquidated as a class”—and various ethnic minorities. In the late 1930s, Mr. Snyder argues, “the most persecuted” national group in Europe wasn’t—as many of us would assume—Jews in Nazi Germany, a relatively small community of 400,000 whose numbers declined after the imposition of race laws forced many into emigration at a time when this was still possible. According to Mr. Snyder, the hardest hit at that time were the 600,000 or so Poles living within the Soviet Union.

Convinced that this group represented a fifth column, Stalin ordered the NKVD, a precursor to the KGB, to “keep on digging out and cleaning out this Polish filth.” Mr. Snyder writes that before World War II started, 111,091 Soviet Poles were executed. This grim period is little known in Poland itself, but its detailed recounting here shows how a determined totalitarian machine could decimate a national group. Apologists for Stalin, in the West and elsewhere, have insisted that his Great Terror was needed to prepare the Soviets for a coming showdown with Hitler. Mr. Snyder destroys this argument. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Victor Davis Hanson presents a lesson from the president’s strategy book on how to destroy an economy.

It is hard for a president to turn a recession into a long-term downturn in the United States, given the inherent resiliency of private enterprise and America’s open and free markets. But if you were to try, you might do something like the following.

First, propose all sorts of new taxes. Float trial balloons about even more on the horizon. Subordinates should whisper about a VAT/national sales tax. Other aides should revisit campaign talk about lifting the caps on income subject to payroll taxes. A centerpiece of the effort would be to insist on bringing back the Clinton income-tax rates — but this time targeting only high earners and not putting commensurate caps on federal spending. For insurance in making things worse, raise capital-gains taxes. And why not add a new health-care tax surcharge? Let inheritance taxes kick back in. … The trick is to dissuade businesses from taking risks, by making clear that any new profits are illegitimate and therefore will go to the government.

Second, business expansion is predicated on confidence in the future. Destroy that, and depression can become far easier to achieve. Often the decision to hire or to buy new equipment is psychological in nature — predicated on hope in the larger business climate. So to ruin that landscape, you might unleash a barrage of anti-business, anti-wealth rhetoric to remind job creators that they are already too rich from exploitative practices. The president himself might lead the attack against Wall Street, CEOs, doctors, and insurers. Now and then it would be wise to spice it up with a nice socialist quip such as “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money” …

Perhaps because the president is in the NYTimes magazine today with a pre-mortem, Charles Krauthammer has a pre-election post mortem with his choices of some of the more notable election facts  

Rising star. Marco Rubio, soon-to-be senator from Florida. He has the ingredients of a young Obama — smart, inspirational, minority (Cuban American), great life story. Headed for a meteoric rise.

Fastest falling star. Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida. Facing disaster in the Republican primary against Rubio, he becomes an independent, flip-flops on one issue after another, and is now running about 16 points behind. Just two years ago, there was talk of him as a Republican vice presidential candidate. Today he’s nowhere man.

Most shameless attack campaign (national). President Obama suggesting that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is secretly using foreign money to fund its campaign ads. There’s not a shred of evidence that this is true. When Bob Schieffer asked David Axelrod for evidence, he responded, “Well, do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob?” That’s like some lunatic claiming that Obama secretly says Muslim prayers at night that no one can see and no one can hear. You ask: What’s your evidence? He says: What’s yours that he is not? You say: No one’s ever seen or heard him do that. He says: Aha, that’s exactly my point.

The president has done another interview. Jonah Goldberg says to get out the shovel.

Back in early 2009, President-elect Barack Obama was asked on Meet the Press how quickly he could create jobs. Oh, very fast, he said. He’d already consulted with a gaggle of governors, and “all of them have projects that are shovel-ready.” When Obama revealed the members of his energy team, he explained that they were part of his effort to get started on “shovel-ready projects all across the country.” When he unveiled his education secretary, he assured everyone that he was going to get started “helping states and local governments with shovel-ready projects.”…

Only now it turns out that the president was shoveling something all right when he was talking about shovel-ready jobs — a whole pile of steaming something.

In the current issue of The New York Times Magazine, Obama admits that there’s “no such thing as shovel-ready” when it comes to public works.

It’s not that Obama was lying when he said all that stuff. It’s just that he didn’t know what he was talking about. All it took was nearly a trillion dollars in stimulus money and 20-plus months of on-the-job training for him to discover that he was talking nonsense. …

Jonah also suggests some reading.

I know it’s already been widely discussed, but I really do think everyone should read the Peter Baker profile of Obama. It is definitive document of sorts that I suspect will be invoked for months and years to come. For Obama’s defenders — however few of them are left — it’s no doubt a sympathetic portrayal. But for everybody else, it’s a pretty astounding indictment of the insularity and arrogance of this administration. The White House view: Our greatest sin was trying too hard to get all of the policies right and failing to appreciate the evil of our opponents and the gullibility of the American people.

Nouriel Roubini has a interesting proposal for tax reform that might actually stimulate the economy. This from an article in Foreign Policy(?).

…Near double-digit unemployment is the root of the problem. Without job creation there’s a lack of consumer spending, which represents 40 percent of domestic GDP. To date, the U.S. government has responded creatively and massively to the near collapse of the financial system, using a litany of measures, from the bank bailout to stimulus spending to low interest rates. Together, these policies prevented a reprise of the Great Depression. But they also created fiscal and political dilemmas that limit the usefulness of traditional monetary and fiscal tools that policymakers can turn to in a pinch.

With interest rates near zero percent already, the Federal Reserve has few bullets left in its holster to boost growth or fend off another slump. This lack of available good options was patently on display in August when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke with a tinge of resignation about new “quantitative easing” interventions in the mortgage and bond markets — a highly technical suggestion that, until the recent crisis, amounted to heresy among Fed policymakers. It certainly hasn’t helped that the U.S. federal deficit has reached heights that make additional stimulus spending, of the kind that helped kindle the mini-recovery of early 2010, politically impossible.  

…Start with the one thing that everyone loves to hate: taxes. Forget the political hot potato over the size and shape of the cuts — there’s an easy way to do this. For the next two years, Obama should reduce payroll taxes for both employers and employees. The reduction for employers will lower labor costs and allow the hiring of more workers; for employees, increased take-home pay will get people spending again. It’s not just about increasing foot traffic in the mall; households need to pay down the burden of credit cards, second mortgages, and other legacies of the years of easy credit. …

In National Review, Nathan Martin tells his experience of crashing MTV’s televised presidential town meeting.

…According to the White House record, here’s how it started:

Q    Mr. President, my name is Nathan Martin.  I actually help produce a conservative talk radio show, and I’m getting married in two weeks.

THE PRESIDENT:  Congratulations.

I went on and asked him about the inconsistencies of his administration in enforcing immigration law vs. drug law, and why California could flaunt federal law with the legalization of marijuana, but Arizona was swiftly reprimanded for “infringing on federal jurisdiction.”…

Rachel Adams, in Bad Rachel Blog, comments on how the teachers’ unions won and the children lost in D.C.

Michelle Rhee—the tough broad who spent nearly four years as D.C. schools chancellor in a pitched battle against the corruption-plagued, incompetence-ridden Washington teachers union to reform a rotten public school system—was forced out today by mayor-elect Vincent Gray in what surely must be seen as a kind of triumph for the union and a potential tragedy for the city’s underprivileged, mostly-black schoolchildren. 

…To think about the absolute indifference to this calamity of members of Congress on the left side of the aisle—to say nothing of Mr. And Mrs. Obama’s breezy unconcern—is to be no less disgusted: These people are tucking their own cute little kids safely away in private schools, many of them, but they “believe” in public education for the city’s beleaguered black children and actively deprive them of any way out.

This is a whipping, plain and simple. Miss Rhee tried to wrest away the whip and got a lashing from Mr. Gray and the union that filled his campaign coffers for her pain. I guess D.C.’s poor black children will be taking their lashing from the president of the United States, to wit, “It took time to free the slaves.”

Whale poop again. Last April we had a piece on the value of whale poo to the health of the oceans. Science Daily has a look at another study.

…Whales, they found, carry nutrients such as nitrogen from the depths where they feed back to the surface via their feces. This functions as an upward biological pump, reversing the assumption of some scientists that whales accelerate the loss of nutrients to the bottom. 

It is well known that microbes, plankton, and fish recycle nutrients in ocean waters, but whales and other marine mammals have largely been ignored in this cycle. Yet this study shows that whales historically played a central role in the productivity of ocean ecosystems — and continue to do so despite diminished populations.

Despite the problems of coastal eutrophication — like the infamous “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico caused by excess nitrogen washing down the Mississippi River — many places in the ocean of the Northern Hemisphere have a limited nitrogen supply.

…”We think whales form a really important direct influence on the production of plants at the base of this food web,” says McCarthy.

“We found that whales increase primary productivity,” Roman says, allowing more phytoplankton to grow, which then “pushes up the secondary productivity,” he says, of the critters that rely on the plankton. The result: “bigger fisheries and higher abundances throughout regions where whales occur in high densities,” Roman says. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Marty Peretz blogs on the administration missteps in Middle East peace efforts.

…The Times piece is by Mark Landler which means it is accurate. And accurate on a weighty topic: “U.S. Faces Risks and Advantages in Bid to Save Talks.”

Apparently everyone now regrets that the president and his siren, Hillary Clinton, made not building in the settlements the key to our entire Middle East policy. The basic objection to this is the crucial issue (or one of the really crucial issues) of where the territorial lines will be drawn. If Israeli settlers build here and not there will have no effect on the prospective borders. None. …

Here’s Malley’s wisdom on the matter: “The original sin was putting so much emphasis, an issue we couldn’t resolve…We’ve spent the whole year trying to undo the damage of that step.”

Jennifer Rubin notes that the attitudes of American Jews are changing.

The second AJC poll of the year has some interesting results…

A bare majority of American Jews (51 percent) approve of Obama’s overall performance, still higher than the nation as a whole, but not nearly the level of support (78 percent) he enjoyed on Election Day or for a good stretch of his term. American Jews’ specific views on Israel and Iran explain, in part, why they have become disenchanted with Obama:

American Jewish confidence in Obama’s approach to Iran has dropped with 43 percent approving of the administration’s handling of the Iran nuclear issue compared to 47 percent in March. Some 46 disapprove, up from 42 percent. Some 59 percent support and 35 percent oppose U.S. military action to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Some 70 percent support and some 26 oppose Israeli military action. …

These findings, in conjunction with the recent poll of all Americans that I discussed here, here and here, point to several important developments. In answer to the question of whether anything can wean Jews of their “sick addiction” to the Democratic Party, the answer seems to be “Obama.” At this rate, his level of support among Jews will roughly match the general population’s, an unheard of phenomenon for the past 75 years. …

Toby Harnden looks at criticism leveled at the administration by the mainstream. Harnden suggests Bob Schieffer’s question to Axelrod of “Is that the best you can do?” is likely to be the epitaph for the administration.

…So the White House and the hapless Democrats running for re-election on November 2nd must be in near despair over David Axelrod’s interview with Schieffer yesterday. In it, the host of CBS’s Face the Nation was incredulous at Axelrod’s focus not on the economy or jobs or health care or the Islamist threat or the wars America is engaged in but, er, the possibility that the US Chamber may be funding ads with foreign money. A charge, of course, which would be called racist if Republicans had levelled it against Obama.

You can watch the exchange here…

Did you get that last comment from Schieffer? “I guess I would put it this way. If the only charge Democrats can make three weeks into the election is that somehow this may or may not be foreign money coming into the campaign, is that the best you can do?” Ouch. …

Jennifer Rubin highlights some well-written criticism of David Axelrod’s attacks, and add her own excellent commentary.

Ed Gillespie is justifiably steamed at the White House. He writes:

“In their latest attempt to distract voters from their job-killing policies, President Obama, his White House and senior Democrats in Congress have added to their long list of bogeymen the outside groups that seek to help elect Republicans in November. They threaten congressional investigations, discuss private tax information and level baseless accusations of criminal activity against those who have been public in seeking to defeat Democratic candidates and their liberal agenda. Without a trace of irony, powerful Democratic officeholders lament that many who support these groups wish to remain anonymous. …”

And if that were not enough, Obama’s closest political hack, Tailgunner David Axelrod, insists that no proof of wrongdoing was needed, “that it was up to the chamber to prove it hadn’t done anything wrong.” In the West Wing, apparently, the American principle is that you’re guilty until proven innocent, and our highest elected and appointed officials are there to hurl the charges. …

Michael Barone puts together some pieces on the hypocrisy of the Chamber of Commerce accusations.

Glenn Reynolds nails this one: the Obama Democrats’ campaign riff against foreign donations to Democrats is bogus—and according to the New York Times, no less. This looks like a matter of projection, since it’s well documented that the 2008 Obama campaign did not put in place address verification software that would have routinely prevented most foreign donations. In effect they were encouraging donations by foreign nationals. …

And here’s our own Washington Examiner editorial from the time:

“Then there’s the question of whether foreign nationals are contributing to the Obama campaign. There is more than enough evidence to warrant a full-scale investigation by the Federal Election Commission, including the $32,332.19 that appears to have come from two brothers living in a Hamas-controlled Palestinian refugee camp in Rafah, GA (that’s Gaza, not Georgia). The brothers’ cash is part of a flood of illegal foreign contributions accepted by the Obama campaign.”

The Obama campaign was happy to encourage mass illegal donations from foreign nationals. Now it’s making baseless charges that its opposition is doing the same thing. Hope and change! …

Mark Halperin is still drinking the cool-aid, but does take exception with the Obami’s partisan attacks.

…But Obama has exacerbated his political problems not just by failing to enact policies that would have actually turned the economy around, but also by authorizing a series of tactical moves intended to demonize Republicans and distract from the problems at hand. He has wasted time lambasting his foes when he should have been putting forth his agenda in a clear, optimistic fashion, defending the benefits of his key decisions during the past two years (health care and the Troubled Asset Relief Program, for example) and explaining what he would do with a re-elected Democratic majority to spur growth.

Throughout the year, we have been treated to Obama-led attacks on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Congressman Joe Barton (for his odd apology to BP), John Boehner (for seeking the speakership — or was it something about an ant?) and Fox News (for everything). Suitable Democratic targets in some cases, perhaps, but not worth the time of a busy Commander in Chief. In the past few days, we have witnessed the spectacle of the President himself and his top advisers wading into allegations that Republicans are attempting to buy the election using foreign money laundered through the Chamber of Commerce, combining with Karl Rove and his wealthy backers to fund a flood of negative television commercials. Not only is this issue convoluted and far-fetched, but it also distracts from the issues voters care about, frustrating political insiders and alienating struggling citizens…

Jennifer Rubin also blogs on the senate race in West Virginia.

West Virginia’s Senate seat is slipping away from the Democrats. In a wave election year, the voters there may decide it is more important to keep their governor home and to send to Congress someone to block Obama’s agenda. So Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin is trying to run from and against the Obama agenda:

In an interview on Fox News, Manchin said he is open to repealing the new healthcare law — the signature accomplishment of Democrats during Obama’s time in the White House.

The governor also took to the airwaves to tout his independence, releasing a TV ad in which he’s shown shooting a hole through the cap-and-trade bill favored by Obama and House Democrats. …

So far, it is not working. Republican John Raese has a lead of 4.5 points in the RealClearPolitics.com poll. It’s not clear that running against Obama is a viable strategy for Democrats, but neither is running on his unpopular agenda. In short, that’s why so many Democrats will lose in three weeks.

John Podhoretz has the latest poll numbers.

Gallup just released its weekly “generic” poll, and for the second week in a row it is forecasting a colossal wipeout for Democrats — with likely voters voting Republican by a margin between 12 and 17 points. Rasmussen, widely and unfairly considered biased towards Republicans, has shown a markedly smaller Republican lead, but this week its likely-voter number has Republicans besting Democrats by 8 percent. Meanwhile, statewide and district-wide polls suggest that a minor surge by Democrats at the end of September seems either to have evaporated or was never all that real in the first place. …

An 8-to-15 point Republican margin in 2010, which seems increasingly possible, will represent a partisan and ideological turnaround of 15 to 24 percent. That is without precedent in the modern era. At the presidential level, Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980 was a landslide but still featured a shift away from Carter of 11 points among the electorate (Carter dropped from 51 percent in 1976 to 40 percent). …

…There’s no reason to think that independents and disaffected Democrats are going to become Republicans, the way the Perotistas did. But the goings-on after Barack Obama’s inauguration may have created a new swing-voting camp of anti-liberals, at least as far as Democratic party orthodoxy defines “liberal,” and how this new camp views the post-November political dynamic will define American politics for the next decade. …

Jay Nordlinger shares various thoughts, and includes an item that demonstrates the difference in character between W and Obama.

…I also have an item on Obama’s gracelessness — on his snippy, snotty remarks about conservatives, Republicans, and others not quite in love with him. Remember how he was supposed to have a “first-class temperament”? I say in my column that even third-class is pushing it. A reader writes,

I didn’t vote for George W. Bush either time . . . But one thing seems to draw little comment: He was subjected to the most intense and odious opprobrium in my lifetime, substantially worse than that flung at Nixon. There were the most vicious and vile accusations. And I cannot recall one instance where Bush lashed back or replied in kind. …

Here’s a stunning article from David Brooks on the ways government unions have destroyed state budgets.

…Over the past few decades, governments have become entwined in a series of arrangements that drain money from productive uses and direct it toward unproductive ones.

New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.

…States across the nation will be paralyzed for the rest of our lives because they face unfunded pension obligations that, if counted accurately, amount to $2 trillion — or $87,000 per plan participant.

All in all, governments can’t promote future prosperity because they are strangling on their own self-indulgence. …

Jonathan Tobin has a great follow-up to his original commentary on Chris Christie’s refusal to bury New Jersey in more debt.

…Brooks acknowledges that the tunnel is needed but rightly notes that the state’s inability to afford it stems from the fact that our states and municipalities are drowning in debt largely generated by the costs of paying government employees and their pensions (an issue that Jeff Jacoby explores at length in this month’s issue of COMMENTARY). It’s all well and good to say that big infrastructure projects are exactly the sort of thing government should be doing, but the liberal addiction to public-sector spending has made that impossible. And the public-sector unions that dominate the Democratic Party make sure this never changes.

One reader reacted to my earlier post on this subject by claiming that what Christie has done is to try and live without debt, a bad policy for any government, business, or family. In fact, what Christie is attempting to do is establish the principle that there must be a limit to debt. Unless our states free themselves from the massive debt that government unions have created, it will become increasingly difficult for government to afford the basic services they are supposed to provide, let alone money pits like the Hudson River Tunnel.

Brooks laments the fact that the left won’t make the hard choices about which government expenditures to prioritize. But the problem here isn’t about priorities but a liberal philosophy that wants no limits on government’s power to spend and therefore tax. Under these circumstances, commonsense conservatives like Christie have no choice but to simply draw a line in the sand and say “no” to the tunnel. …

In the New Scientist, Andy Coghlin reports on a new archaelogical finding. The science piece today is a stunner. Paleontologists have found a 500,000 year old partial skeleton of a pre-courser of both Neanderthals and modern humans. It is evident the remains are from a 45 year old man who was infirm suggesting his tribe took care of him. Pickerhead has long been amazed by the human capacity for caring and sharing that it repeatedly demonstrated by discoveries in anthropology and other social sciences. Colin Turnbull’s Mountain People describes the almost complete societal breakdown of the Ik people, 1,000 hunter-gatherers, who were forced by the government of Uganda to leave their ancestral land and take up farming. Yet, while in their degraded state, they would be very cautious when a kill had been made to find wood that would burn without smoke so the feast could be enjoyed without discovery. Because if another individual happened on the scene, the meal would be shared.

It is impossible to read history and not conclude human beings are steadily improving in one significant way; we keep finding better and better ways to help those, who for one reason or another, are unable to cope with life as it has presented itself. Our battles with the left are not over whether we should help, but over what would be the most constructive ways. People who love freedom believe market based economies provide the abundance to improve the collective wealth, and therefore improve the physical and mental well being of our fellows. Of course, you must have superior education to see this. And then it is hard to prove this would be the result. We have to teach the left it is not enough to wish something will happen, you also must understand the unintended consequences of coercion by the state.

He was too old to hunt, a hunchback probably needing a cane for support, and suffered terrible lower back pain. But a member of the human family who lived 500,000 years ago is the most elderly ancient human ever found. The individual of the species Homo heidelbergensis has been named “Elvis” after his pelvis and lower backbone were uncovered in Atapuerca, northern Spain. The hunter-gatherer was about 45 years old when he died.

…The fact that Elvis was so infirm suggests he was looked after by his contemporaries, which Bonmatí’s team say is good evidence that hunter-gatherers didn’t abandon the weak. He could not have been an active hunter, nor could he carry heavy loads. …

…A year ago, the same team reported evidence from Atapuerca that a 12-year-old child with skull malformations was cared for by the same group.

“We have evidence building up that these people were caring,” says Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London. “This individual probably could move around, but couldn’t get his own food, so it implies a level of social support, and that he was valued by his contemporaries.”

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

In the NY Daily News, Philip K. Howard from Common Good discusses needed changes in the government.

…What’s required to revive America is major structural overhaul. This is a task of historic proportions – not unlike the simplification of law by Justinian in ancient Rome. Our founding fathers never imagined that democracy would become a one-way ratchet – always adding laws but never repealing them. Nor did they intend law to be a form of central planning. …

The core principle of this overhaul should be this: Restore free choice at every level of responsibility.

For example, let all public schools operate with the same freedoms, and accountability, as charter schools. Give officials the responsibility to balance different interests – not be forced by legal threats to give away scarce common resources to whoever threatens a lawsuit. …

…Cleaning out old mandates and entitlements would allow political leaders to make choices to meet today’s needs. Radically simplifying law would allow people, including members of Congress, to actually understand it. …

Michael Barone interviews Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels about a possible presidential run.

…And he says that, if he runs, he’ll be a different kind of candidate. As for “the federal fiscal picture…can we agree that the arithmetic doesn’t work? We’re going to have higher and higher levels of debt.”

He goes on. “This is a survival-level issue for the country. We won’t be a leader without major change in the federal fiscal picture. We’re going to have to do fundamental things you say are impossible.”

…He’s also got some more short-term proposals — a payroll tax holiday to stimulate the economy, reviving the presidential power of impoundment (not spending money Congress has appropriated), a moratorium on federal regulations. …

Robert Costa reports that Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey just won the first Tea Party poll.

The New Jersey governor wins a 2012 straw poll in Richmond:

Attendees of the inaugural Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention selected New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as their number one choice for President in 2012 by a narrow margin in one of the first presidential straw polls of the 2012 campaign, giving Gov. Christie early recognition in a potentially crowded field of candidates. A total of 1,560 individuals cast ballots in the straw poll that was conducted here Oct. 8-9.

Former Alaska Governor and GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin came in second, and Congressman Ron Paul was third in the unofficial poll, the first Tea Party straw poll ever conducted and an early indicator of preference for individuals affiliated with Tea Party organizations. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors update us on the latest chapter of the global warming scandal.

…Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, took to the pages of the Washington Post Friday…

Mann warns that Republicans would launch “a hostile investigation of climate science.” But investigation is, in fact, warranted.

Harold Lewis, physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been a member of the American Physical Society, the second-largest association of physicists in the world, for 67 years — most of the organization’s existence. A couple of days before Mann’s piece appeared, Lewis tendered his resignation.

…Lewis’ letter charged that climatologists have a monetary motive to promote global warming. Then he jabbed none other than Mann, arguing that Penn State “cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for” pouncing on Mann for his role in Climate-gate.

That scandal found prominent scientists unscientifically conspiring to keep dissenting researchers from publishing their findings. As to next month’s elections, the public clearly has a stake in sending people to Washington who keep the taxpayers’ money from such charlatans.

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, James Delingpole posts Dr. Harold Lewis’ resignation letter in full. It is well worth reading, as it may help to restore faith that there are still honorable scientists who seek the truth.

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.

Anthony Watts describes it thus:

This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.

It’s so utterly damning that I’m going to run it in full without further comment. …

In Popular Mechanics, Kalee Thompson discusses the dangers of commercial fishing and one economic activity where the media needs to shed more light.

…the Bureau of Labor Statistics ranks commercial fishing as America’s most lethal job. Adjusted to the size of the workforce, the 2008 fatality rate for U.S. fishermen was five times that of truck drivers, eight times that of police officers and 19 times that of firefighters.

…Between 1992 and 2007, a staggering 1903 American commercial fishing vessels sank, according to a comprehensive Coast Guard report. As a direct result, 507 people died, accounting for more than half of the 934 commercial fishing deaths during that 16-year period. Most of the remaining fatalities were due to falls overboard or a variety of grisly equipment-related accidents.

It’s no coincidence that the number of lost boats and lives is far higher for fishing than for any other type of waterborne industry. Passenger ferries, cargo ships and virtually all other commercial boats are held to much higher regulatory standards. All but the largest factory-style fishing vessels remain uninspected, which means that ensuring a boat’s seaworthiness—including the strength of its hull, the stability of its design and the integrity of its watertight compartments—is solely up to the ship’s owners. …
…Hiscock helped to draft legislation, now languishing in Congressional committee, that is crucial to lowering fishing’s unacceptable death toll. If the bill passes, the new regulations would require Coast Guard inspections for all fishing boats more than 50 feet, as well as stronger construction requirements for new boats, more stringent regulations for officer licensing and mandatory crew training. Meanwhile, boats keep sinking. …

…That single federal law governing commercial fishing boats—the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act of 1988—mandates that ships carry life rafts, fire extinguishers, signal flares and a registered emergency position-indicating radio beacon (EPIRB). In cold waters, a full-body neoprene survival suit is required for every person on board. Modest as it is, the law has had a big impact. After its implementation in the early 1990s, the death rate among shipwrecked crewmen fell by close to 50 percent. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Craig Pirrong shares comments on the new National Security Advisor from the Obami, and sharply criticizes Obama’s judgment.

We will soon have a bona fide political hack as National SecurityAdvisor.  One whom SecDef Gates slammed in Woodward’s book:

In the book “Obama’s Wars,” Woodward writes that, “Gates felt that Donilon did not understand the military or treat its senior leadership with sufficient respect.”

“The secretary later told Jones that Donilon would be a ‘disaster’ as Obama’s national security adviser,” Woodward wrote.

The man he is replacing, Jim Jones, was even more scathing:

…“He had never gone to Afghanistan or Iraq, ‘or really left the office for a serious field trip,’ ” Jones said of Donilon in Woodward’s book. “As a result, he said, ‘you have no direct understanding of these places. You have no credibility with the military. You should go overseas.’ ” …

…“You frequently pop off with absolute declarations about places you’ve never been, leaders you’ve never met, or colleagues you work with,” Woodward quoted Jones as saying about Donilon.

…Jones was no prize as NSA, but he had spent his life in, you know, national security.  In contrast, just what do you learn about national security while serving as a lobbyist for Fannie Mae? Or as a consultant for Goldman and Citi?

…His appointment is proof of the abject politicization of national defense under Obama. National security as the continuation of domestic politics by other means.  Yes, Bryan, there is inevitably a political component to defense policy.  But in his subordination of security to domestic political considerations, Obama has gone beyond the pale. …

Toby Harnden lists ten reasons why we should be concerned about Tom Donilon’s appointment.

8. Donilon is close to Joe Biden. Biden has got it wrong on just about every major foreign policy issue in modern times. Enough said.

9. Donilon is a former lobbyist. Remember how Obama was going to change how Washington worked and rid the city of lobbyists? Well now his top foreign policy adviser is a former lobbyist for Fannie Mae who consulted for Goldman Sachs.

10. The Obama administration is unravelling. Republicans can gloat about this but it is bad news for Americans and the world that Obama has lost several top economic aides, his chief of  staff and now his top foreign policy adviser BEFORE the mid-term elections. It shows a degree of crisis and disarray that cannot be good in policy terms.

We’ll see how Donilon works out but, to put it mildly, this is not an appointment that inspires much confidence.

John Steele Gordon responds to criticisms of NJ Governor Chris Christie for just saying no.

Both Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert last week bemoaned the decision by Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey to put the kibosh on a multi-billion-dollar project to build a second railroad tunnel under the Hudson River. The project, which was originally budgeted at $8.7 billion had crept up — in the time-honored way of government projects — to over $11 billion, and many thought it would reach $14 billion before all was said and done. New Jersey would have been responsible for much of the cost overruns, and Governor Christie thought the state, deeply mired in debt already, could not afford it. And so he killed the project.

…When we began the Interstate Highway System, the national debt was about 60 percent of GDP and falling. We had run budget surpluses in seven of the previous 10 years. When we went to the moon, the national debt was 39 percent of GDP and falling. It is now over 90 percent and rising rapidly. And the move from 40 percent of GDP to 90 percent was not because of moon shots or Manhattan Projects. It was so no one in Washington (and many state capitals) ever had to say no to anyone, especially public-service unions. …

…The people of New Jersey had processed that information, and that’s why they elected Governor Christie. I suspect that people in the rest of the country have also processed it, and that’s why the political establishment is going to get clobbered in three weeks.

George Will opines that whether or not the Dems keep majorities in Congress, Obama loses.

…Since 1966, liberal overreaching has been difficult. After November, it will be impossible, for many years. For Obama, the worst result next month might be for Democrats to retain control of both houses of Congress. If they do, their majorities will be paralyzingly small. And their remaining moderates will be more resistant to the liberal leadership: The moderates will have survived not because of, but in spite of, those leaders.

Today, if you see Obama in a political ad, you are almost certainly watching a Republican ad. And a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that more than twice as many people view House Speaker Nancy Pelosi negatively (50 percent) than positively (22 percent).

If Democrats retain control of Congress, Obama will seek reelection while being perceived as responsible for everything in Washington, where everything is perceived to be dysfunctional. And anti-Washington fever may be worse than it is today, because the 2010 elections will not seem to have changed very much. …

Schumpeter’s Blog at The Economist highlights a National Affairs article on government unions from Daniel Disalvo.

NATIONAL AFFAIRS is shaping up to be a worthy successor to “The Public Interest”, one of the great periodicals of the post-war era.

The current issue contains a superb essay, by Daniel Disalvo, on America’s public-sector unions, which have an extraordinary power to force the state to dance to their tune, squashing innovation, reducing productivity and undermining competitiveness. Given that America needs to reinvent much of its antiquated state apparatus, particularly its schools, if it is to remain competitive with the emerging world, I suspect that the country’s future depends on its ability to master, or sideline, these ever-mightier institutions. Some choice extracts:

…Yet as skilled as unions may be in drawing on taxpayer dollars, many observers argue that their greater influence is felt in the quality of the government services taxpayers receive in return. In his book “The Warping of Government Work”, Harvard public-policy scholar John Donahue explains how public-employee unions have reduced government efficiency and responsiveness. With poor prospects in the ultra-competitive private sector, government work is increasingly desirable for those with limited skills; at the opposite end of the spectrum, the wage compression imposed by unions and civil-service rules makes government employment less attractive to those whose abilities are in high demand. Consequently, there is a “brain drain” at the top end of the government work force, as many of the country’s most talented people opt for jobs in the private sector where they can be richly rewarded for their skills (and avoid the intricate work rules, and glacial advancement through big bureaucracies, that are part and parcel of government work)….

Thus, as New York University professor Paul Light argues, government employment “caters more to the security-craver than the risk-taker.” And because government employs more of the former and fewer of the latter, it is less flexible, less responsive, and less innovative. It is also more expensive: Northeastern University economist Barry Bluestone has shown that, between 2000 and 2008, the price of state and local public services has increased by 41% nationally, compared with 27% for private services….

In the National Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Daniel Hannan about his new book on the dangerous path America is taking.

Daniel Hannan could be the ultimate tea-party candidate, waving his pocket Constitution, citing the Founders, and warning that we are in danger of losing America itself. Hannan even holds public office. Just not in America. He’s a Brit — and a member of the European Parliament — with a love for the Red, White, and Blue. It’s out of that love that he’s written The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America. He talks about it with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: “The United States is becoming just another country.” How far along are we?

DANIEL HANNAN: The abandonment of American particularism started with the first Roosevelt but really took off with the second. Like most bad things, it happened from good intentions. FDR saw himself as the champion of the masses against the lobbies. Convinced of his moral rectitude, he tolerated no constraints on his power. He sidelined the legislature, ignored the conventional two-term limit, ruled by executive order, tried to pack the Supreme Court and constructed a massive federal bureaucracy, much of which is still in place. 

You don’t need to look far to see parallels with the past two years. A Democratic president assumes office, bringing a massive majority with him to both Houses. He takes over during a financial crisis that has been blamed on a failure of capitalism. He’s determined to “do something” — and that something involves extending government and spending a great deal of money. The economic ill effects are already becoming clear; but the political consequences, as power is shifted from the 50 states to Washington, from the legislature to the executive, from the elected representative to the federal czar, from the individual to the government, are far more deleterious. …

Kirk Johnson, in the NY Times, has a fascinating article unraveling the mystery of the dying bees.

…Dr. Bromenshenk’s team at the University of Montana and Montana State University in Bozeman, working with the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus one-two punch was found in every killed colony the group studied. Neither agent alone seems able to devastate; together, the research suggests, they are 100 percent fatal.

…Research at the University of California, San Francisco, had already identified the fungus as part of the problem. … But the Army/Montana team, using a new software system developed by the military for analyzing proteins, uncovered a new DNA-based virus, and established a linkage to the fungus, called N. ceranae.

“Our mission is to have detection capability to protect the people in the field from anything biological,” said Charles H. Wick, a microbiologist at Edgewood. Bees, Dr. Wick said, proved to be a perfect opportunity to see what the Army’s analytic software tool could do. “We brought it to bear on this bee question, which is how we field-tested it,” he said.

The Army software system — an advance itself in the growing field of protein research, or proteomics — is designed to test and identify biological agents in circumstances where commanders might have no idea what sort of threat they face. The system searches out the unique proteins in a sample, then identifies a virus or other microscopic life form based on the proteins it is known to contain. The power of that idea in military or bee defense is immense, researchers say, in that it allows them to use what they already know to find something they did not even know they were looking for. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Today’s Pickings From the Webvine is a don’t miss collection of blog posts focused on one of the major defects of the left vision of governance. The occasion for this was granting of exemptions to Obamacare by Kathleen Sebelius of HHS. A number of our favorites; Streetwise Professor, W. W. in Democracy in America Blog, Jennifer Rubin, Yuval Levin, Ed Morrissey, Peter Wehner, WSJ editors, have cogent thoughts. One blogger pulled up this from Federalist Paper 62; “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”

Read Pickings and remember why it is we fight against these people in Washington.

If you thought government was out of control before, just wait. Craig Pirrong explains how Congress’ gifts of discretionary control to federal agencies means we are going to be ruled by thousands of bureaucrats and their whims.

HHS Czarina–I mean Secretary–Kathleen Sebelius has deigned to grant waivers from Obamacare mandates to big companies like McDonalds and Jack in the Box, and some big unions.  Get ready for this Brave New World, and not just in health care.

…In the terms of the economics literature, Obamacare, Frank-n-Dodd, etc., are incomplete contracts that do not specify actions in all eventualities.  Instead, they largely create governance mechanisms and delegate residual control rights.  In the event, the rights of control are delegated to political appointees and staffers at Federal cabinet departments and agencies.

These control rights determine bargaining power.  And what that means is that in health care and finance–meaning, in just about every economic activity, because virtually every business intersects these sectors–virtually everything will be a negotiation between the government and those in its thrall–meaning the rest of us.  (The word thrall in its noun form, by the way, is a synonym for” serf.”)  These control rights also determine the allocation of the bargaining surplus–who gets the goodies, and who gets screwed. …

…This corporatist, highly personalized, transactional system (all words that describe the current Russian government, by the way), will condemn the US to years of stagnation.  They will be a drag on growth, and provide an incentive for able individuals to devote their talents to negotiating for rents with their governmental overlords, rather than thinking of and implementing new ways to create things that people value. …

The Economist’s Democracy in America Blog has W.W. discussing Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and the crucial importance of limiting government power with clearly stated laws.

…Hayek draws out the difference between “a free country” and “a country under arbitrary government”. A country counts as free only if its government is bound by the rule of law, which, according to Hayek, “means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand”. Typically, these rules, once fixed, are written down and then published through official state organs. The idea is that politically-determined rules need to be relatively fixed and publicly known in order to create a stable and certain framework in which individual planning and complex social coordination can flourish. The goal of replacing arbitrary government with the rule of law implies for Hayek, among other things, that executive discretion ought to be reduced “as much as possible”. …

…For Hayek, the rule of law means that these constraining rules must not play favourites, but rather must embody ideals of impartiality, generality, and equality before the law. Hayek’s proposal for a generality or non-discrimination amendment to the constitution (defended here by James Buchanan) nicely illustrates what he took to be the practical upshot of his ideal of the rule of law. …

Jennifer Rubin weighs in on how giving government officials’ arbitrary latitude to decide how rules will be enforced greatly increases government power, and greatly increases the amount of resources used to curry the favor of bureaucratic tyrants, rather than producing something of worth in the economy.

…This is one more example of the pattern we have seen since the closing weeks of the Bush administration. As the bailouts and mind-numbingly complex legislation multiplies, the private sector becomes rife with rent-seekers, looking to spin the dials and eke out some preferential treatment from the heavy hand of government. CEOs are chosen for their political and PR skills, not their prowess as wealth creators. Business judgment is clouded and distorted as businessmen must look over their shoulders to avoid the wrath of  bureaucrats and elected officials.

The fact that these judgments are unmoored to any fixed rules and depend on the whim of government officials makes it all the worse. If the rules are unclear and the name of the game is about access, the opportunities for corruption multiply. In fact, it’s hard to tell what corruption is. …

Yuval Levin brings our attention to a slippery slope that increases government power and corruption, and weakens the economy and innovation.

One of the problems with massive, complicated government regulations is that they create a lot of room for regulator discretion, and therefore a lot of room for unequal treatment of different players in the market. Many opponents of Obamacare argued before the legislation was enacted that it would do just that throughout the healthcare sector—would empower the federal government to pick favorites rather than allowing for simple uniform rules that enable the kind of competition and consumer choice that can actually help control costs.

We can already see this happening in practice, even long before most of Obamacare’s most significant rules and regulations go into effect. The Department of Health and Human Services announced yesterday that 30 corporations (including McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, and a New York teachers’ union) would receive exemptions from a rule that would have required them to raise the minimum annual benefit in their employee insurance plans.

The exemptions themselves are good news, since the rule would have forced these companies to drop their employee coverage, leaving almost a million workers without the insurance they had before Obamacare. But it means that these companies now need permission from the administration to offer their employees a benefit they have offered for years. And of course, many other companies—those without the lobbying operation of a company the size of McDonald’s, or without the access to liberal policymakers that a NY teachers’ union  has—can’t get the same permission, and so can’t compete on a level playing field, or offer coverage that might entice the best qualified people to work for them. This kind of government by whim, and not by law, is the essence of the regulatory state. We are about to see a whole lot more of it—unless the health-care law enacted in March is repealed.

Ed Morrissey blogs about big government helping out big business, while everyone else with less power gets Obamacare expenses. He makes a good point of the arrogance of lawmakers, with little to no experience in the real world, thinking that they know how to run a segment of the economy better than everyone else.

…First, let’s point out that the law turned out to be unworkable, almost before it even got started.  Dictating percentages for administration costs in insurance plans isn’t the job of the federal government anyway, but more to the point, that issue is obviously not determinative in value to the consumer — as these waivers proved.  This shows what happens when people with no experience in an industry decide that they can construct it better than the market has structured itself.

The proper action would have been to repeal at least this portion of the law in order to give a level playing field to everyone.  By granting a few dozen waivers at the outset, though, the White House has amplified the uncertainty and arbitrariness in ObamaCare even further.  At least insurers and employers had a figure that they could use for planning.  Now there is no standard at all, except for whatever Kathleen Sebelius decides she likes — and whom she wants to favor.

The Rule of Law depends on an environment with clear regulation and unbiased enforcement.  From the start, ObamaCare lacked any clarity in regulation.  Congress filled the bill with the phrase “The Secretary shall determine” in place of establishing rules and regulations for the massive regulatory regime Congress created.  Now, the White House has added arbitrary enforcement to uncertain regulation and opaque processes.  This is not the Rule of Law, but the Whim of Autocracy.

Peter Wehner also comments on the fallout from implementing the monstrous legislative mess that Congress passed.

In interpreting a key Department of Health and Human Services announcement, the New York Times reported that so far, 30 insurers, employers, and union plans, responsible for covering about one million people, have been given one-year waivers by the government on the new rules that phase out annual limits on coverage for limited-benefit plans, also known as “mini-meds.” In the words of the Times, “the waivers have been issued in the last several weeks as part of a broader strategic effort to stave off threats by some health insurers to abandon markets, drop out of the business altogether or refuse to sell certain policies.”

This action highlights one of the great dangers of ObamaCare, which is that every health-care decision now has to run through the federal government. Private companies have to bow before its throne, asking for waivers and massively complicating their own lives. The federal government is now in a much stronger position to pick winners and losers and rig the game. …

…The waivers are also the Obama administration’s attempt to minimize the negative impact of ObamaCare less than a month before the midterm election. It’s now clear that the new health-care law was very poorly constructed and is having enormous implementation problems. To issue waivers to undo the damaging effects of a new law is a very bad sign. No wonder so few Democratic candidates are running on their support for ObamaCare – and why so many Republican candidates are running hard against it. …

Clayton Cramer’s Blog has excellent quotes from the Federalist Papers on some of the problems our recent lawmakers have created for our nation.

Ask the authors of Federalist 62.  First, the problem of the health care reform bill that came to 2700 pages:

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”

…And why employers are reluctant to hire right now:

“In another point of view, great injury results from an unstable government. The want of confidence in the public councils damps every useful undertaking, the success and profit of which may depend on a continuance of existing arrangements. What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed? What farmer or manufacturer will lay himself out for the encouragement given to any particular cultivation or establishment, when he can have no assurance that his preparatory labors and advances will not render him a victim to an inconstant government? In a word, no great improvement or laudable enterprise can go forward which requires the auspices of a steady system of national policy. …”

The WSJ editors comment on the foreclosure moratorium.

…Yes, the same crew… that ran roughshod over its own transparency rules—not to mention the established customs of the House and Senate—to restructure American medicine is now appalled that some paperwork at private businesses may have been incorrectly processed. To be clear, bank employees appear guilty of sloppy work, and problems in the back office should be corrected, but freezing activity in a $2.8 trillion financial market is the last thing this economy needs and is in no way proportional to the problems reported so far.

Now President Obama is refusing to sign a previously noncontroversial measure to have states recognize notarized documents from other states. Among other things, the bill would have streamlined the process of moving people out of homes they can’t afford and therefore would have helped to allow housing markets to clear and begin to heal. …

If evidence emerges of policies or actions that wrongly threw people out of their homes, by all means investigate and prosecute violations of law. But allowing people to live in homes without paying for them is not cost-free. That cost will be borne directly by investors in mortgage-backed securities and mortgage servicing companies, and ultimately by American taxpayers, who now stand behind 90% of new mortgages, thanks to guarantees by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration.

The bigger damage here is to the housing market, which desperately needs to find a bottom by clearing excess inventory and working through foreclosures as rapidly as possible. The moratoriums further politicize the housing market and further delay a housing recovery. In an economy and a financial system engulfed in Washington-created uncertainty, the political class has decided to create still more.

Thomas Sowell looks at Jerry Brown’s previous record and other issues in the California gubernatorial race.

…One appointment by Governor Jerry Brown ought to tell us a lot about his ideology. His most famous– or infamous– appointment was making Rose Bird chief justice of the California supreme court.

She over-ruled 64 consecutive death penalty verdicts and upheld none. Apparently no judge or jury could ever give a murderer a trial perfect enough to suit Rose Bird.

To hear Rose Bird and her supporters tell it, she was just “upholding the law.” But, fortunately, the California voters saw right through that pretense, and realized that she was doing just the opposite– imposing her own personal opposition to the death penalty in the guise of interpreting the law. No California chief justice appointee had ever been voted off the bench by the voters before Rose Bird, but she was roundly defeated when 67 percent of the voters voted against her in a confirmation election required by California law.

Two of her like-mind colleagues on the California supreme court were likewise voted off the bench. They, too, were appointed by Governor Jerry Brown.

The question is not whether you are for or against the death penalty. If you don’t like the death penalty, you can vote to repeal it. But it is not the job of judges to deprive the voters of their right to choose the laws they want to live under.

This is part of a much larger arrogant political ideology, in which anointed elites impose their own notions, in utter disregard of the laws passed by the people’s elected representatives.  …

Thomas Sowell has more commentary on the coming elections.

Some of the longest-serving members of Congress, whose party has overwhelming majorities in both houses, are having far closer election races than they are used to. These include Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, not to mention 18-year veteran Senator Barbara Boxer.

…Usually, the incumbents can talk about their “experience.” But experience at what? Deception? Earmarks? Reckless spending? …

…The big question for the election next month is whether the voters keep their eye on the ball and judge candidates by what policies they advocate or whether they can be thrown off the track by red herrings.

We have already seen in 2008 what can happen when voters fail to pay attention to a presidential candidate’s track record, and let themselves be dazzled by rhetoric, symbolism and media hype. We are losing not only our jobs but our country— and this could be our last chance to stop the Obama-Pelosi-Reid juggernaut.

David Warren takes us down memory lane with Penguin Books.  

They look so frail, now — this “parcel of Penguins” that has resurfaced from my own distant past. They are from a time less than half a century ago, yet to a person who has lived the intervening years, they may come as archaeological relics.

I am referring, of course, to paperback books, not birds from Antarctica. The collective noun provides a happy play on words, for I believe “parcel of penguins” is correct for the birds — as opposed to a rookery, crèche, or huddle of them. Every child of the English language discovers, or ought to have his moment of discovering this wonderful world, in which we speak of a “siege of bitterns,” a “clattering of jackdaws,” a “musket of lyrebirds,” a “gaggle of geese.” And in case one has forgotten, today we have Wikipedia.

A “parcel of penguins” is quite literally what one used to receive, through the post, when far away from home. They were printed on paper not only cheap, but light; they were 7-1/8 by 4-3/8 inches strictly (a Golden Section); they tied together in a nice secure block. And no gift from home could be more welcome.

I have spoken with a man who was raised under Communism, in Hungary. He spoke of the thrill when a parcel of Penguins made its way to him, through the Iron Curtain. In another case, I recall such a parcel travelling into the mountains of Nepal, as birds not flightless. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Nile Gardiner has some surprising poll numbers on the change in attitude toward W.

Several months ago a huge billboard appeared near Wyoming, Minnesota, with a beaming photo of George W. Bush with the caption “Miss me yet?” The answer to that question is clearly yes, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research poll, which shows the former president staging a remarkable political recovery despite having largely disappeared from public life since leaving office:

By 47 to 45 percent, Americans say Obama is a better president than George W. Bush. But that two point margin is down from a 23 point advantage one year ago.

“Democrats may want to think twice about bringing up former President George W. Bush’s name while campaigning this year,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

This has to be one of the most extraordinary political comebacks in decades. And as this week’s Washington Post/ABC News poll showed, nearly 25 percent of Democrats now believe “a return to Bush’s policies would be good,” a staggeringly high figure. …

Charles Krauthammer indicts the Democrat Congressional leadership for their reckless, irresponsible actions.

…For the first time since modern budgeting was introduced with the Budget Act of 1974, the House failed to even write a budget. This in a year of extraordinary deficits, rising uncertainty and jittery financial markets. Gold is going through the roof. Confidence in the dollar and the American economy is falling — largely because of massive overhanging debt. Yet no budget emerged from Congress to give guidance, let alone reassurance, about future U.S. revenues and spending.

That’s not all. Congress has not passed a single appropriations bill. To keep the government going, Congress passed a so-called continuing resolution (CR) before adjourning to campaign. The problem with continuing to spend at the current level is that the last two years have seen a huge 28 percent jump in non-defense discretionary spending. The CR continues this profligacy, aggravating an already serious debt problem.

As if this were not enough, Congress adjourned without even a vote — nay, without even a Democratic bill — on the expiring Bush tax cuts. This is the ultimate in incompetence. After 20 months of control of the White House and Congress — during which they passed an elaborate, 1,000-page micromanagement of every detail of American health care — the Democrats adjourned without being able to tell the country what its tax rates will be on Jan. 1.

It’s not just income taxes. It’s capital gains and dividends, too. And the estate tax, which will careen insanely from 0 to 55 percent when the ball drops on Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Nor is this harmless incompetence. To do this at a time when $2 trillion of capital is sitting on the sidelines because of rising uncertainty — and there is no greater uncertainty than next year’s tax rates — is staggeringly irresponsible. …

The NY Daily News editors tell us what happens when Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder insist on trying a military criminal case in a civilan court.

The disastrous folly of trying Al Qaeda enemy combatants in civilian court stands proven beyond a reasonable doubt in the case of the first Guantanamo detainee brought to New York to face justice.

There is abundantly conclusive proof that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani participated in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. At least 5,000 were wounded.

…These facts come courtesy of Ghailani’s own mouth. He revealed them under interrogation while in clandestine CIA custody before transfer to Guantanamo. Therein lies the legal absurdity.

The CIA grilled Ghailani in the interest of national security – to prevent further terrorist attacks – and not as a run-of-the-mill criminal suspect with full U.S. constitutional rights. …

In the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Patrick McIlheran has a great piece following a visit to Wisconsin by New Jersey governor Chris Christie.

We and Jersey reached this pass not because public employees are greedy. They aren’t. They just took the offered deal. Were your boss to say you could get premium-free health, free pension, high pay and ironclad security, of course you’d take it. I would.

Nor is it because unions are greedy, exactly. Their purpose is to maximize what members get, and they’re doing it. Where they can be faulted is that they’ve become huge players in politics, electing the officials with whom they bargain.

The main fault lies with those elected officials. They have, over decades, tended to give in, buying themselves peace with taxpayer money. Both Republicans and Democrats have been among the spineless.

… Unless fiscal conservatives who are willing to push hard on labor costs and spending make it into office, the public sector will ever more resemble a racket existing chiefly for the enrichment of public servants. …

It is truly amazing to watch a politician who demonstrates responsibility and accountability. Jonathan Tobin blogs about another instance where Governor Chris Christie is halting the spending spree by New Jersey’s government.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is still acting as if he means what he says about controlling the costs of government. By canceling the long-planned construction of a second commuter tunnel under the Hudson River today, Christie has reaffirmed the principle that government should not try to do more than it can afford. A close look at the finances of the scheme showed that cost overruns were likely to send the bill on the project to as much as $14 billion, almost $6 billion more than the original estimate. That means that New Jersey — which is to say, New Jersey’s taxpayers — would have to pay at least $8 billion of that amount, the remainder being contributed by New York’s Port Authority and the federal government. But in the absence of givebacks by the state’s civil-service unions, whose contracts and pensions threaten to send the state into the red even if the tunnel were not to be paid for, Christie said no, to the utter consternation of the unions, the rest of the political class, and New York Times’s columnist Paul Krugman.

Other politicians (like Christie’s predecessor Jon Corzine, who authorized ground breaking on the project without thinking about the costs to the taxpayers) are shocked by Christie’s chutzpah. The idea that government should only undertake those projects it can pay for without having to further bilk the taxpayers is considered a shocking concept.

Krugman, the Times editorial page, the unions, and many of the politicians who have worked for this project all think the mere fact that the tunnel is needed justifies any amount of debt to build it. They also seem to think that worrying about where the extra $6 billion will come from is just silly. …

Peter Schiff writes that the time for government inaction is now.

…In Crash Proof, I talked about how our economy suffered from the co-morbid diseases of asset bubbles, excessive debt and consumption, and insufficient savings, capital investment, and production. These conditions did not arise as a result of market forces, but from foolish monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policies that distorted market forces. The proper cure would have been to remove the distortions and allow the markets to correct.

…By electing to bail out the financial sector, prop up housing prices, allow excess spending and borrowing to continue, and maintain superfluous government and service-sector jobs, the government has pushed our economy to the edge of a very dangerous precipice.

The right choice is to admit past mistakes and reverse course. The Fed must raise interest rates aggressively, shrink its bloated balance sheet, and allow the real recession to finally run its course. It will be much more painful now than it would have been in 2008, but at least this time the pain will end and real recovery will take hold. By forcing the federal and state governments to slash spending, sound monetary policy will allow market forces to rebuild a solid foundation upon which future prosperity may be built.

The wrong choice is for the Fed to continue quantitative easing as planned, allowing the government to grow at the expense of the economy. This will widen the economic imbalances that lie at the root of our problems. As a side effect, the US dollar will continue spiraling downward as it becomes clear to foreign creditors that the Fed has no interest in protecting their investments. A weaker dollar will lead to higher inflation and higher interest rates, which will make the Fed’s task that much more difficult.  

In the end, our bubble economy will not just deflate, it will burst. The dollar will collapse, consumer prices will skyrocket, real credit will completely evaporate, millions more will lose their jobs, and our economy will change in ways few of us can imagine. Our standard of living will plummet and legions of middle- and upper-class Americans will be impoverished. It is not a pretty picture, but unfortunately, it’s the one our government is painting. Unfortunately, we are running out of time to change artists.

David Goldman has a short post on the lost government jobs.

The biggest contributor to the 95,000 reduction in non-farm payrolls was declining state and local government employment. I’ve been warning about that all year. Municipal finances were an extension of the real estate boom and are having their Wile E. Coyote moment.

We’re in a miserable meta-equilibrium. The collapse of the Obama administration is good for the economy — it can’t do any more damage — but the Republicans will not be in any position to roll back the damage already done, for example, Obamacare. That leaves us in a 2% or so growth environment.

David Harsanyi tells Republicans not to give into the Left’s fear tactics on trade protectionism. And Harsanyi makes a key point that tariffs amount to taxes that Americans will pay on imports.

…We’re losing manufacturing jobs. Scary stuff. Which candidate is going to explain to the voters that outsourcing has allowed the American workforce to trade up to better jobs, and allows companies to grow their businesses and expand their workforces?

Which candidate is going to point out that manufacturing jobs have declined in the past 20 years because there has been an incredible rise in the productivity of the American worker? The output at U.S. factories was 37 percent higher in 2009 than it was in 1993.

…”Our philosophy has to be not how many protectionist measures can we put in place, but how do we invent new things to sell,” Rudy Giuliani once explained, near perfectly. “That’s the view of the future. What [protectionists] are trying to do is lock in the inadequacies of the past.” …

Jeff Jacoby also makes logical points against protectionism. We have featured writers who note that government regulations stifle manufacturing in the US. Blaming the Chinese for the government’s anti-business practices is the easy way out, and politicians are happy to have a scapegoat.

THE POLICIES of the Chinese government make it possible for Americans to acquire a vast array of products at affordable prices. For that high crime and misdemeanor, the US House of Representatives voted last week to punish China.

The vote on HR 2378, which would authorize punitive tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States — which include everything from clothing, furniture, and toys to refrigerators, computers, and sporting goods — was a lopsided 348 to 79….

…But what exactly is so awful about selling good stuff cheap to tens of millions of US consumers?

…The protectionists claim that forcing China to revalue the yuan would boost US manufacturers, adding as many as a million new jobs to American payrolls. That too is debatable. Economist Mark Perry argues that it is the breathtaking increase in US manufacturing productivity, not the value of Chinese currency, that is largely responsible for the disappearance of so many manufacturing jobs in recent years.

Not many firms welcome tough competition, so it isn’t hard to understand why US exporters who compete directly with Chinese firms want to see Congress rig the trade by slapping punitive tariffs on imports made in China. Their concern is with their bottom line; they aren’t thinking about the millions of American households that would be forced to contend with higher prices. …

Jennifer Rubin follows up on the BP oil spill commission’s findings, and comments on Obama’s lack of administrative judgment.

Some on the right, joining the president’s usual defenders, were sympathetic to Obama’s handling of the BP oil spill. A president isn’t all-powerful. We can’t expect him to prevent or repair all mishaps. True, but there were well-founded criticisms (from the affected governors, for starters) about the federal government’s response. It turns out Obama did indeed mismanage things from start to finish:

The Obama administration was slow to ramp up its response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, then overreacted as public criticism turned the disaster into a political liability, the staff of a special commission investigating the disaster say in papers released Wednesday.

…And then there is the most egregious error — the drilling ban, which was legally suspect and economically disastrous for the region.

It is true, as in so many areas of policy, that expectations for the president are unreasonably high. For that, he has only himself and his advisers to blame, for constructing a messianic campaign and operating with an alarming degree of hubris. But the “unfair expectations” defense is a bit of a dodge. In truth, Obama and his team do not perform well in a crisis, lack management skills, and repeatedly fail to gauge public reaction. That’s not a matter of unreasonable expectations; that is a lack of competency and a failure to meet the minimum requirements of the job.

In the Weekly Standard, John McCormack reports on more Obami bad behavior aimed at their political opposition.

The inspector general for tax administration at the Treasury Department will investigate the allegation that an Obama administration official may have improperly accessed and discussed private taxpayer information.

At an August 27 press briefing, a senior administration official, who appears to have been Austan Goolsbee, discussed the tax status of Koch Industries–a private company that has come under fire from top Democrats, including President Obama himself, for funding conservative and libertarian political causes.

…But on September 24, Republican senators wrote in a letter to the inspector general that they were unsatisfied with this explanation. Senator Chuck Grassley and other Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee requested that the inspector general look into the “very serious allegation that Administration employees may have improperly accessed and disclosed confidential taxpayer information.” …

Instapundit posts one reader’s response to a Chinese dissident winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

UPDATE: Reader David Gerstman writes:

Last year Thomas Friedman was writing that America needed to be more like China and adopt one-party democracy.

Two weeks ago he told us that America needs to be more like China and adopt green technologies.

Yes, this Thomas Friedman.

So now can we expect a Thomas Friedman column telling America to adopt the policy of harrassing the families of Nobel Prize winning dissidents? I guess not, we don’t have Nobel Prize winning dissidents here; political opposition is legal here. Still do you think that we might see a Friedman column soon condemning China? Or is China’s enlightened leadership above criticism in Tom’s benighted opinion?