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Mark Steyn has a wonderful way of exposing the idiocy of current establishment thinking. Here he discusses how multi-culturalism is complicit with Islamo-fascism.

…Too many people in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven’t touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It’s one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it’s hard to see why it’s in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in. …

…As I said in America Alone, multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that “in my country everyone is free to criticize the President”, and the Soviet guy replies, “Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your President.” Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals’ loathing of their own.

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threaten it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop”. Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people. …

In AOL News, John Merline has an interesting discussion on the official end of the recession and what this means about Obama’s economic measures.

You’d think the news that the Great Recession is officially over would be something to cheer about. On Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research — the official recession scorekeeper — said the downturn that began in December 2007 ended way back in June 2009.

Anyone feel like celebrating?

The news is particularly unhelpful to the Obama administration right now.

…The trouble is that we now know the recession ended just as the stimulus money started to get spent. According to the White House’s own 100-day stimulus report, issued at the end of May 2009, only $45.6 billion in spending and tax relief had gone out the door by then. In other words, less than 6 percent of the stimulus money was in the economy as the recession ended…

John Fund writes about Obama-Carter comparisons.

Comparisons between the Obama White House and the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter are increasingly being made—and by Democrats.

…Walter Mondale, Mr. Carter’s vice president, told The New Yorker this week that anxious and angry voters in the late 1970s “just turned against us—same as with Obama.” As the polls turned against his administration, Mr. Mondale recalled that Mr. Carter “began to lose confidence in his ability to move the public.” Democrats on Capitol Hill are now saying this is happening to Mr. Obama. …

…Pat Caddell, who was Mr. Carter’s pollster while he was in the White House, thinks some comparisons between the two men are overblown. But he notes that any White House that is sinking in the polls takes on a “bunker mentality” that leads the president to become isolated and consult with fewer and fewer people from the outside. Mr. Caddell told me that his Democratic friends think that’s happening to Mr. Obama—and that the president’s ability to pull himself out of a political tailspin is hampered by his resistance to seek out fresh thinking. …

Michael Barone looks at how the gubernatorial races are shaping up.

…Republicans currently lead in polls in 12 of the 18 states where they have governors now, and all of their incumbents are ahead. They’re behind in five relatively small Democratic-leaning states where Republican incumbents are retiring, but by wide margins only in two, Hawaii and Connecticut.

…Democrats are faring worse. Their nominees are currently trailing in 13 of the 19 states where they hold the governorships. Only three of their nominees have double digit leads — in Bill Clinton’s home states of Arkansas and New York and in Colorado, where the Republican nominee has been disavowed by many party leaders.

Most unnerving for Democrats is that their nominees are currently trailing by double digits in the nation’s industrial heartland — in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. These are states Barack Obama carried with 54, 51, 57 and 62 percent of the vote.

Democrats are not supposed to be trailing there in times like these. The old political rule is that economic distress moves voters in the industrial heartland toward Democrats. Oldtimers remember that that is what happened in recession years like 1958, 1970 and 1982. …

Colin Powell showed up last weekend to remind us how silly he can be. The Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on his recent Sunday news program gaffe.

Americans are grateful to Gen. Colin Powell for his exemplary service in uniform. But in his media-ordained role as political wise man, his knowledge and judgment leave a lot to be desired.

Powell is touted as a rare sage within the Republican Party (though it’s a funny kind of Republican who endorses Barack Obama at the worst time imaginable for his GOP opponent, in October 2008). The media present him as a better angel of our nature who has chosen to belong to a hellish political organization dominated by intemperate ideologues.

…But on Sunday, Powell again and again proved his sage status to be little more than a myth. Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the biggest embarrassment came when the veteran of the last three Republican administrations took a shot at “his” party on immigration. …

Common sense has long since left the green movement. Jeff Jacoby discusses the tyranny of the trash police, and the added expense of their mandates.

…Unlike commercial and industrial recycling — a thriving voluntary market that annually salvages tens of millions of tons of metal, paper, glass, and plastic — mandatory household recycling is a money loser. Cost studies show that curbside recycling can cost, on average, 60 percent more per ton than conventional garbage disposal. In 2004, an analysis by New York’s Independent Budget Office concluded, according to The New York Times, that “it cost anywhere from $34 to $48 a ton more to recycle material, than to send it off to landfills or incinerators.’’

“There is not a community curbside recycling program in the United States that covers its cost,’’ says Jay Lehr, science director at the Heartland Institute and author of a handbook on environmental science. They exist primarily to make people “feel warm and fuzzy about what they are doing for the environment.’’

But if recycling household trash makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, why does it have to be compulsory? Mandatory recycling programs “force people to squander valuable resources in a quixotic quest to save what they would sensibly discard,’’ writes Clemson University economist Daniel K. Benjamin. “On balance, recycling programs lower our wealth.’’ Now whose idea of exciting is that?

Froma Harrop explores the economic unsustainability of universities, but then brings up an exciting alternative.

…Bill Gates recently predicted: “Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”

A year at a university costs an average $50,000, the Microsoft founder and Harvard dropout said last month. The Web can deliver the same quality education for $2,000.

Yet American colleges continue to float in the bubble of economic exceptionalism once occupied by Detroit carmakers. American median income has grown 6.5 times over the past 40 years, but the cost of attending one’s own state college has ballooned 15 times. This kind of income-price mismatch haunted the housing market right before it melted down. …

…The market will eventually recognize the out-of-whack economics of today’s “place-based colleges” and intervene. Some day soon, Web alternatives will let students of modest means try their hand at a college education. And what a great day that will be.

In Reason, Steve Chapman comments on Cuba’s dismal economic and political situation. It’s so bad that the UN has praised Castro.

…the average Cuban makes only about $20 a month—which is a bit spartan even if you add in free housing, food, and medical care. For that matter, the free stuff is not so easy to come by: Food shortages are frequent, the stock of adequate housing has shrunk, and hospital patients often have to bring their own sheets, food, and even medical supplies.

…Instead of accelerating development, Castro has hindered it. In 1980, living standards in Chile were double those in Cuba. Thanks to bold free-market reforms implemented in Chile but not Cuba, the average Chilean’s income now appears to be four times higher than the average Cuban’s. …

…The latest instrument for strangling dissent is a law allowing the arrest of people exhibiting “dangerous” un-socialist tendencies even before they commit crimes. “The most Orwellian of Cuba’s laws, it captures the essence of the Cuban government’s repressive mindset, which views anyone who acts out of step with the government as a potential threat and thus worthy of punishment,” says Human Rights Watch.
But even economic failures and political tyranny have been not enough to deprive Castro of Western admirers. On a 2000 visit to Havana, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asserted, “Castro’s regime has set an example we can all learn from.” …

And we have NRO Shorts. Here are three:

Senate Democrats (plus Republican George Voinovich) looked ready at press time to pass a bill that would push another TARP-like infusion of capital into the banking system, on the theory that the banks do not have enough money to lend, or, if they do have enough, that they are not making enough loans to small businesses and need to be given better incentives to do so. To that end, the Small Business Lending Fund would allow the Treasury Department to make up to $30 billion in credit available to small community banks at varying rates of interest: The more politically conforming loans the banks make, the less interest they pay. Banks that “plan to provide linguistically and culturally appropriate outreach” would receive special consideration, of course. The fund is a bad idea. Those community banks that are most eager to borrow from the fund are more interested in political protection than in making sound loans, while those community banks that have responded to the weak economy with an appropriate and measured reluctance to lend are unlikely to take the money anyway. There is the administration’s economic policy in a nutshell: reckless borrowing to finance reckless lending.

In a renewed effort to promote homeownership, the Home Affordable Modification Program now instructs mortgage servicers to identify all applicants by race, even if they balk. The program’s new guidebook stipulates that if the borrower declines to provide a racial affiliation, “the servicer should . . . provide the information based on visual observation, information learned from the borrower or surname.” It gets creepier. Servicers are advised to provide employees with “training and job aids (e.g. desk references)” to help them racially inspect clients with clinical expertise and up-to-date stereotypes. The purpose, naturally, is to fight racial bias.

When in the past we have criticized college courses for catering to students’ tastes, we were speaking metaphorically. Not anymore. Earlier this month, 600 students crammed into a 350-seat lecture hall at Harvard University for a new class, “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science.” The course, which fulfills a core-curriculum requirement, promises to “discuss concepts from the physical sciences that underpin . . . everyday cooking.” It will feature guest lectures by world-famous chefs, such as Enric Rovira on “his chocolate delicacies.” Here’s a sampling of the required reading: On Food and Cooking, Kitchen Mysteries, and The Science of Ice Cream. When asked by the Harvard Crimson why he was taking the class, one knowledge-hungry student responded: “I think the fact that you can eat your lab is pretty much the coolest thing ever.” Given tuition, it had better be five-star.

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Bill Kristol starts us off with a transcript of Congresswoman Eleanor Norton soliciting contributions from a lobbyist. He takes an excellent macro view of the incident.

…If you set up a casino of welfare statism, crony capitalism, and big government liberalism, this is what you’re going to get.

…The point is that this is what happens when you have crony capitalism and a big government welfare state. Tea Party activists already understand this. The Norton phone call is just more evidence for their broader point about how the current system works and why it has to be reformed.

So our advice to GOP candidates is this: Go ahead and play aloud the Eleanor Holmes Norton tape. But don’t then waste time excoriating the D.C. delegate. Instead, ask your constituents whether this is the kind of government they want. Point out to them that low tax rates do not invite this kind of extortion, while earmarks and stimulus spending packages do. Turn the ethical issues of this Congress (and this administration) into fodder for a broad reform agenda of re-limiting government…

Thomas Sowell comments on the sad outcome of D.C.’s mayoral election.

Few things have captured in microcosm what has gone so painfully wrong, where racial issues are concerned, like the recent election for mayor of Washington, D.C.

Mayor Adrian Fenty, under whom the murder rate has gone down and the school children’s test scores have gone up, was resoundingly defeated for re-election.

…Either one of these achievements would made mayors local heroes in most other cities. Why then was he clobbered in the election?
One key fact tells much of the story: Mayor Fenty received more than 70 percent of the white vote in Washington. His opponent received more than 80 percent of the black vote.

Both men are black. But the head of the school system that he appointed is Asian and the chief of police is a white woman. More than that, most of the teachers who were fired were black. There were also bitter complaints that black contractors did not get as many of the contracts for doing business with the city as they expected.

In short, the mayor appointed the best people he could find, instead of running a racial patronage system, as a black mayor of a city with a black majority is apparently expected to. …

Toby Harnden describes the Tea Party movement in the wake of a number of Republican primary wins for Tea Party candidates.

…Polling indicates that they are now more popular than either Republicans or Democrats. Despite all the claims they are extremists, around half of the electorate now identifies with the Tea Party and up to a quarter view themselves as members.

…A desire for small government, lower taxes and fidelity to the United States Constitution binds members together. There is a prevailing mood of anger towards Washington and a sense of having been conned. …

But beyond that, the Tea Party is a vast, teeming muddle of opinion and impulses. Many of its strong supporters don’t attend public meetings. “The Tea Party is more an attitude than anything organised,” one Southern conservative told me.

…The Republican primary system is such that ordinary people can reject the choice of the party hierarchy. This has now happened with Senate races in Florida, Alaska, Utah, Kentucky, Colorado and Nevada as well as Delaware.

For all the talk of how the Tea Party will help the Democrats by splitting the Republican vote, the first five of those states are highly likely to result in Republican/Tea Party wins, Nevada is in the balance and only Delaware looks like an uphill struggle. Increased conservative turnout and the energy generated by the Tea Party is likely to punish Democrats disproportionately. …

David Warren writes his first column on what needs to be done to get government under control.

…A correspondent in Virginia, responding to last week’s column, put this point so well, that I will quote and not paraphrase: “Patients are no longer responsible for their own good health; doctors and the ‘health care system’ are. Students are no longer responsible for their own learning: teachers and the schools are. And citizens, by extension, are no longer responsible for their own civic well being; someone else is.”

The most urgent political task, now and into the indefinite future, is to articulate such home truths, in direct defiance of the “progressive” Zeitgeist.

That, more than anything else, is what Reagan and Thatcher accomplished in their day: setting their faces against the statist breeze. Lord knows, they accomplished little at the practical level. But for a glimmering moment, they helped us remember that a nation is her people and not her government.

They knew that bureaucracy is an evil; but accepted it as a necessary evil, susceptible to reform and occasional “downsizing.” We need to take one step farther, and grasp that it is an unnecessary evil — that any human activity which requires a cumbersome bureaucracy is itself morally dubious; that anything which reduces the human being to a “unit” for bureaucratic purposes is in its nature inhuman.  …

Jennifer Rubin turns an Obama phrase on its head.

…Obama declares that the choice is between “hope and fear.” Actually, he’s right, but not in the way he intends. For many voters the hope is that electing conservatives to Congress will slow and reverse the spend-a-thon and focus the peripatetic White House on the issue they care most about — jobs. As for the fear, one suspects the public has grown weary of the host of villains the White House conjures up to deflect attention from its own dismal record.

It’s been two years since Obama articulated his own hopeful vision. Now it’s all about recriminations and finger-pointing. You wonder what his reaction will be when the Bible- and gun-huggers, the stooges of the insurance industry, and the Islamophobes stream to the polls, throw out many Democratic incumbents, and declare Obamanomics kaput. At this point, he’s certainly not acting like a president prepared to take the voters’ message to heart and revise his agenda accordingly. …

And we have more witty commentary from Jennifer Rubin, this time at Jimmy Carter’s expense. She wonders if Obama is up to being a worse ex-president than president because Carter has set a new precedent.

Jimmy Carter has been an annoyance to every one of his successors. He’s played footsie with dictators, made common cause with Israel’s enemies, made Osama bin Laden’s book list, and demonstrated the peevishness that was not yet fully in evidence during his presidency. He then pronounces that he is ”superior” to all his successors. Sensing that is a bit much for Saint Jimmy, he backpedals, explaining, “What I meant was, for 27 years the Carter Center has provided me with superior opportunities to do good.” Not much better is it? Frankly, on this one even Bill Clinton has the right to be offended.

Carter, as one of the wittiest commentators points out, now insists in his diary (on Osama bin Laden’s nightstand no doubt!) that he would have won in 1980 had it not been for those darn hostages and the pesky Ted Kennedy. …

…Carter has managed, arguably, to be a worse ex-president than president. For Obama, that will be a challenge.

Thomas Sowell looks at the concept of nuclear disarmament.

…Had there been no nuclear weapons created during World War II, that would have given an overwhelming military advantage in the postwar world to countries with large and well equipped armies. Especially after the U.S. Army withdrew from Europe, following the end of World War II, there was nothing to stop Stalin’s army from marching right across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean.

…Western Europe has had one of its longest periods of peace under the protection of the American nuclear umbrella. Japan, one of the biggest and most cruel conquerors of the 20th century, has become a peaceful nation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the real world, the question of whether nuclear disarmament is desirable or undesirable is utterly irrelevant because it is simply not possible, except in words— and we would truly be fools to accept such words at the risk of our lives. …

The WSJ editors comment on an economic clunker.

…economists Atif Mian of the University of California Berkeley and Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago have examined “cash for clunkers,” the $2.85 billion program that subsidized consumers to buy new cars and destroy older ones. Their conclusion: The program “had no long run effect on auto purchases.” It did juice sales during its two-month run last summer, by about 360,000 cars, but then it quickly hurt sales by about the same amount, in effect stealing purchases from the future. The program was a wash in a mere seven months.

…It’s impossible to test what would have happened without cash for clunkers because there’s no control group. But Messrs. Mian and Sufi do the next best thing by looking at how clunkers were distributed around the country. Comparing high-clunker areas to low-clunker areas—and thus the areas that were more “stimulated”—allowed them to measure relative economic outcomes.

Lo, Messrs. Mian and Sufi found in their paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research that there was “no noticeable difference” in economic outcomes among the 957 metropolitan areas they studied. …

George Will shares his thoughts on Castro’s late awakening to economic reality.

Fidel Castro, 84, may have failing eyesight but he has noticed something: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” So, the secret is out. …

…By saying what he recently did about the “Cuban model” (he said it to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic), Castro seems to have become the last person outside the North Korean regime to understand how statism suffocates society. Hence the Cuban government’s plan to shed 500,000 public employees.

This follows a few other measures, such as the denationalization of beauty parlors and barber shops — if they have no more than three chairs. With four or more, they remain government enterprises. Such is “reform” under socialism in a nation that in 1959 was, in a variety of social and economic indices, one of Latin America’s five most advanced nations, but now has an average monthly wage of about $20. Many hospital patients must bring their own sheets. …

…Today, the U.S. policy of isolating Cuba by means of economic embargoes and travel restrictions serves two Castro goals: It provides an alibi for Cuba’s social conditions, and it insulates Cuba from some of the political and cultural forces that brought down communism in Eastern Europe. The 11th president, Barack Obama, who was born more than two years after Castro seized power, might want to rethink this policy, now that even Castro is having second thoughts about fundamentals.

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Jonah Goldberg breaks down the Senate races to see if Republicans can take control. See his post for the charts.

Okay, I decided it was time for me to put on my rank punditry hat and start looking at the horserace stuff in the Senate. So here’s a pretty vanilla tally of things, that at least helps me commit this stuff to memory.

Lots of people say that without Delaware, taking back the senate is now impossible. Looking at this rundown in First Read, I’m not so sure…Geraghty or Ponnuru can check my math. But it looks to me that  the GOP would need to hold all of the existing seats (FL, AK, OH, KY, MO, NH) –  which looks likely –  and then pick up 10 of the remaining 13 contested Dem seats (ND, AR, IN, PA, CO, WI, IL, CA, NV, WV, WA, CT and DE). The first five of those looks likely according to this chart by Mark Blumenthal…

…The next three are doable if everything breaks the GOP way (I think Wisconsin is going to the GOP, by the way). That makes a pick-up of 8. Then the GOP would need to take 2 seats out of the five [Me: this originally said "four"]remaining races in West Virginia, Washington, Connecticut and Delaware.

Update: Getting better all the time. Several readers remind me that Charlie Cook put Connecticut in the toss-up column yesterday.
That would be a huge parlay. It’s doable in a wave election. But it would need to be a really big wave.

Ramesh Ponnuru comments on Jonah Goldberg’s tally.

I don’t think nominal control of the Senate is all that important (which is why my concerns about the O’Donnell nomination have not included that it endangers that “control”). In the House, 218 votes really is a magic number. Having a tiny majority brings headaches but going from 217 to 218 is a much bigger increment of power than going from 216 to 217. I don’t think that going from 50 to 51 in the Senate is quite as crucial. The key numbers in the Senate are 40 and 60–and even that gets fuzzy if party discipline does.

I’d fiddle with FirstRead’s rankings on the likelihood of Republican pickups. I’d say Colorado is more likely than Illinois, and Wisconsin more likely than Nevada.

Tunku Varadarajan covers the bases in a guide to the Tea Party movement.

What would we do without the Tea Party? For well over a year, this rollicking muster of citizens—mocked and feared in equal measure by the Democrats and, indeed, by many Republicans—have offered more than just whizz-bang political entertainment. Starting out as a loose-knit posse of loudly disaffected conservatives, the movement has become better organized and improbably daring; in fact, it is now a full-blown political uprising. As we gird our national loins for the mid-term elections in November, here is a brisk primer on the movement.

A is for anger, the jet-fuel of a movement that Nancy Pelosi, in a rare moment of wit, pooh-poohed as Astroturf (i.e., not grassroots). Tell that to Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate nominee seeking to unseat Pelosi’s confrere, Harry Reid. She is the archetypal Tea Party insurgent: she checks all the ideological boxes, but would you have her home to dinner with the kids?

B is for Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart, the two gaudiest Tea Partiers in the American media, and for Scott Brown, the Massachusetts senator whose astonishing election to Ted Kennedy’s seat in February was the earliest indication that the Tea Party amounted to more than just a rabble of birthers (although it does, to be sure, have in its ranks more than a few who believe that the president’s birth-certificate is an immaculate deception). …

Hugh Hewitt suggests campaigns that could use our contributions.

With just about 40 days to go to the election –less, actually, as voting starts very soon by absentee in many places– it becomes crucial to target time and money to key races. This is my suggested list of candidates to support.  You can donate up to $2,400 per candidate in federal races and more in most state races, but many people like to contribute to multiple campaigns, so I am listing them with the assumption that some folks want to donate $25, $50, $100 or more to many different campaigns.

Please note that I am not listing some great campaigns.  John Thune, for example, is coasting in South Dakota, and though he may be the best conservative candidate in the country this cycle, he doesn’t need your money right now.  That goes for Governor John Hoeven in North Dakota as well, running for U.S. Senate there and leading by about 100 points.

By contrast, John Kasich and Pat Toomey are both on the list and at the top no less, even though both have pretty good poll leads right now in their races for governor in Ohio and senator in Pennsylvania respectively.  I strongly recommend them because they are building get-out-the-vote organizations that will help many down-ticket races for Congress.  Please note as well that I only list one race per state so I am suggesting those races over their fine colleagues on the ticket –Rob Portman for senate in Ohio and Tom Corbett for governor in Pennsylvania– because Kasich and Toomey have tougher races at this point than Portman and Corbett.  When there is both a competitive race for senate and governor in a state, I suggest sending money to the race which is closest in that state.

Finally, I do have some races like Carly Fiorina and Sharron Angle rated higher on the list because of the message a defeat of Boxer or Reid would bring and because of the expected surge of resources the left will throw against them in the next six weeks. …

Robert Samuelson disagrees with the right and the left, and then discusses the anti-business climate.

…Confidence is crucial to stimulating consumer spending and business investment, and Obama constantly subverts confidence. In the past year, he’s undone some of the good of his first months. He loves to pick fights with Wall Street bankers, oil companies, multinational firms, health insurers, and others. He thinks that he can separate policies that claim to promote recovery from those that appeal to his liberal base, even when the partisan policies raise business costs, stymie job creation, or augment uncertainty—and, thereby, undermine recovery. His health-care “reform” makes hiring more expensive to employers by mandating insurance coverage; the moratorium on deepwater drilling kills jobs. No matter.

Obama’s proposal to increase taxes on personal incomes exceeding $250,000 ($200,000 for singles) is the latest example of his delusional approach. It satisfies the liberal itch to “get the rich.” Well, the rich and most other taxpayers will ultimately have to pay higher taxes to help close budget deficits. But not now. Raising taxes in a weak economy doesn’t make sense. Just consider: these affluent households represent almost a quarter of all consumer spending, says Zandi. Richard Curtin, director of the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers, says his data suggest that uncertainty about the extension of the Bush tax cuts has already caused affluent buyers to cut their spending.

Some small businesses would also be affected, because many (sole proprietorships, partnerships, and subchapter S corporations) file their taxes on personal returns. Higher taxes would discourage hiring and expansion. …

Ed Morrissey discusses Lisa Murkowski’s write-in campaign for the Alaskan Senate seat. He names the only Senator to ever win a seat from a write-in campaign, and comments on the likelihood that Murkowski will be the second such win in US history.

…Lisa Murkowski has never been terribly popular with Alaskans, not since her father appointed her to the Senate seat she holds.  She won in 2004, mainly due to the overwhelming support for George Bush in Alaska.  She just lost her primary, which means more than half of the people who would normally be inclined to vote for the Republican didn’t want her in the general election anyway.  Murkowski offered no compelling reason to vote for her in the primary, and the only compelling reason for the write-in bid seems to be that Lisa Murkowski likes living in Washington DC. …

The Financial Times paints a portrait of Raul Castro, as dramatic changes are initiated in Cuba.

There are two very different visions of the young Raúl Castro who fought alongside his older brother Fidel and Che Guevara against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista more than five decades ago. …

…the 79-year-old is now more likely to go down in history as the man who tried to save Cuban communism from itself – by turning to capitalism. This week the government announced it is to shed 500,000 workers, who will instead have to become self-employed or start co-operatives in just six months. As Raúl said: “We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world in which people can live without working.” The measures will eventually lead to 1m, or a fifth of the labour force, working in the private sector, and represents the biggest shake-up of the Cuban state since 1968, when all shops, from hamburger joints to street vendors, were nationalised. …

…It was only in July 2007, however, that he gave his first major public speech in which he echoed popular complaints of a decaying command economy where state wages, equivalent to $20 a month, cannot cover bare necessities. Since then he has repeatedly decried paternalism, called for more individual initiative and encouraged the public and official media to denounce bureaucratic bungling. When Fidel quipped the other day that the Cuban model no longer worked, he was merely uttering the common view fostered by his brother to prepare the way for change. Any hard-line dissenters in the elite – who might respect but do not revere Raúl as they do Fidel – fell in line. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, James Delingpole has the latest in globaloney warming

President Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren is worried about global warming. Having noticed that there hasn’t actually been any global warming since 1998, he feels it ought to be called “global climate disruption” instead. That way whether it gets warmer or colder, wetter or drier, less climatically eventful or more climatically eventful, the result will be the same: it can all be put down to “global climate disruption.”

And that will be good, because it will give Holdren the excuse to introduce all the draconian measures he has long believed necessary if “global climate disruption” is to be averted: viz, state-enforced population control; a rewriting of the legal code so that trees are able to sue people; and the wholesale destruction of  the US economy (“de-development” as he put it in the 1973 eco-fascist textbook he co-wrote Paul and Anne Ehrlich Human Ecology: Global Problems And Solutions).

Holdren is not the only person having problems with the “world not warming and everyone growing increasingly sceptical” issue. …

The Economist reviews a book of letters from the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN, known to his mother as Dan and to everyone else as Pat, served four presidents—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—as adviser, speechwriter and ambassador, in Delhi and at the United Nations. He represented New York for 24 years in the United States Senate. When he retired, one scholar said he brought to that job “luminous intellect, personal conviction, deep historical knowledge, the eye of an artist and the pen of an angel, and above all, an incorruptible devotion to the common good”. Someone else called him “the nation’s best thinker among politicians since Lincoln, and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson”.

Now a New York Times journalist, Steven Weisman has edited a 671-page collection of Pat’s letters, diary entries, reports to his New York constituents (addressing them as “Dear New Yorker”) and what amount to state papers written for his four presidents. Almost every page is enlivened by a sharply minted phrase, an enchanting vignette, a joke or a shrewd inversion of the conventional wisdom. …
…He knew everyone. He wrote to cardinals, presidents, senators, to the Oxford historian Alan Bullock and to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, to William F. Buckley and to Jackie Kennedy Onassis. In a letter to Yoko Ono, he offers to teach Sean Lennon about Northern Ireland. A couple of weeks later he offers, at some length, to explain the history of ethnic conflict in the 20th century to Woody Allen. He sends limericks to Robert Conquest, a historian of the Soviet Union. He also has time to exchange charming letters with the preteen daughter of an old friend, who has asked him about the games he played as a child: “We used to play marbles for keeps. If you lost, you lost. It is the same way with politics, but not everybody knows this.” …

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No doubt GOP voters in Delaware have selected a senate candidate who is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Today we’ll try to understand how this happened. Pickerhead says better a flake than the bien pensants from the Northeast who have bankrupted the country and tried to destroy our most important alliances. And the cartoonists are having fun with the tea parties.

In WSJ’s Best of the Web, James Taranto posts a Delaware reader’s decision to vote for Christine O’Donnell in the primary.

Reader Dave Beruh writes in response to our column yesterday on the Delaware Senate primary:

…I agonized quite a bit before voting for Christine O’Donnell. My politics (I believe) are similar to yours, I’m an agnostic, and social issues aren’t very important to me, although I would probably be in favor of compromise (civil unions, keeping abortion legal but emphasizing adoption, etc.).

For me Rep. Mike Castle’s cap-and-trade vote was my last-straw moment. …

Toby Harnden writes in the Telegraph, UK, about Christine O’Donnell’s primary win and its wider implications.

…O’Donnell is a party apparatchik’s nightmare. Although attractive and personable – there is a physical as well as a political resemblance to Palin – she is a flawed candidate who will struggle against her Democratic opponent in November’s midterm elections. …

…Yet the point to take from Delaware is that none of this really matters. To say that voters are angry is an understatement. They are furious, disgusted and resentful. They are fed up of being told by besuited party honchos and professional politicians whom they should vote for, and what they should think. …

…So the reaction of establishment figures to O’Donnell’s win was as predictable as it was misguided. Karl Rove, former Svengali to George W Bush, branded her “nutty”. Senate Republicans, who trashed her in the primary campaign, announced they would not fund their new nominee. Rove’s point may be substantively correct, and in terms of allocating the party’s resources, not funding O’Donnell makes some sense. But the response showed an arrogance that will fuel the outrage Republicans should be trying to harness. …

…There are certainly some eccentric characters at Tea Party events, but the vast majority are small-government conservatives who think Washington is corrupt, complacent and working for itself rather than the people. Those feelings have only been exacerbated by President Obama’s policies: elected on a wave of anti-Bush feeling, he interpreted the desire for something different as a mandate for a vast expansion of government, piling trillions on to the already swollen national debt. In Florida the other day, I saw a home-made sign tied to the front gate of a modest home in a black neighbourhood. “No more big plans with my money,” it declared. That’s the essence of the Tea Party message – and it has huge resonance. …

This Corner Post suggests she might do just fine.

“There’s been no witchcraft since. If there was, Karl Rove would be a supporter now,” O’Donnell jokingly assured the crowd.

Toby Harnden also sets the record straight on some of the misinformation being circulated about the Tea Party.

…There’s a glut of commentary and assumptions about the Tea Party and much of it is wrong. Here are some common mistakes:

1. The Tea Party will fade away. Christine O’Donnell’s victory confirms that it is a major electoral force. Many of those involved have not voted before. The movement is growing, not shrinking.

…5. The Tea Party is part of the Republican party. It’s not. Tea partiers are conservatives but they have little interest in simply achieving a Republican Congress. Its ambitions are much bigger than that.

…8. The Tea Party is full of loonies who believe masturbation is evil and dinosaur bones are fake. We’ll see a lot of citations of the “nutty” (K.Rove) opinions of Tea partiers – especially, for the next few days at least, by O’Donnell. But the broader Tea Party has little concern about social issues. It is primarily a low-tax, small-government movement.

…10. The Tea Party is an angry reaction to Obama’s 2008 victory, which was a true realignment of US politics. There was no political realignment in 2008. Obama won because he was anti-Bush and the country was in the mood for a complete change. It was not a mandate for increasing the national debt and growing government. While the Tea Party opposes Obama and all he stands for, it is not especially focussed on him personally. In fact, Congress – Democrats and Republicans – seems more unpopular than Obama among Tea partiers.

Charles Krauthammer tells everyone fed up with government to focus on candidates who can win seats, so Obama and the liberals can be stopped. And he rightly tells Jim DeMint and Sarah Palin to put their money where there mouths are, and start campaigning for O’Donnell in Delaware.

…Bill Buckley — no Mike Castle he — had a rule: Support the most conservative candidate who is electable.

A timeless rule of sober politics, and particularly timely now. This is no ordinary time. And this is no ordinary Democratic administration. It is highly ideological and ambitious. It is determined to use whatever historical window it is granted to change the country structurally, irreversibly. It has already done so with Obamacare and has equally lofty ambitions for energy, education, immigration, taxation, industrial policy and the composition of the Supreme Court. …

 In Contentions, Abe Greenwald adds his thoughts.

…The very reason O’Donnell is attracting attention is because she’s an aberration and not an exemplar. If the Tea Party were made up of nothing but Christine O’Donnells, it would not have produced a Tupperware party’s worth of turnout at a single event. Yet the movement caught fire among America’s working class and reshaped the political landscape in about a year. It befuddled the liberal establishment because it could not easily be pegged as crazy, misguided, or inauthentic.

…What is most significant is that small-government, anti-elite, anti-tax sentiment is so strong that an apparent oddball candidate was not enough to dissuade conservatives of their passion for reform. …

And we have some excellent points from J.E. Dyer, in Contentions.

…It’s becoming clear that ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, bank bailouts, private-sector takeovers, czars of the week, and epic deficit spending are more alarming to voters than Ms. O’Donnell’s views on sanctity in private life. As a (relevant) aside, I give most voters credit for understanding that O’Donnell doesn’t propose using the power of the state to enforce on others the particular views for which she has recently gained notoriety. That level of interference in private life is antithetical to the Tea Party demand for smaller government; indeed, under the daily assault of Obama’s energetic regulators, a growing number of voters are associating such intrusiveness explicitly and resentfully with the political left.

But the national electoral dynamic this year isn’t about O’Donnell; it’s about changing course. And in making their choice, the Republican voters in Delaware showed a perfect comprehension many senior conservatives haven’t. A vote for Mike Castle was, in fact, a vote for the status quo. The voters knew what they were voting for — and many of them would have said that the kind of strategic voting urged on them by pundits and political professionals is exactly what has produced the status quo.

…But the people are on the move. George W. Bush said often during the 2004 campaign that the poll that mattered was the one that occurred in the voting booth. In a majority of “voting booth” polls this year, the people have signaled that their dissatisfaction with our current course outweighs everything else. …

In Der Spiegel, Jess Smee highlights various German newspaper editorials on the Tea Party primary wins.

…On Thursday, German editorialists look at what the latest victory means for US politics.

…The business daily Handelsblatt writes:

“Glen Beck, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are part of an opposition movement outside of Congress which is moving mountains. This is a revolt against ‘Obamaism,’ which is seen as representing big government, more taxes, a higher deficit and not enough ‘Americanism.’ Day by day, it puts more and more pressure onto those at the top.”

“In the US, people … spend time and money supporting the Republicans. Unlike in Germany, in America, which never had a Hitler, being ‘right-wing’ is not taboo. ‘Right-wing’ represents Reagan, religion, the free market, individualism, patriotism and small government. In reality, it is an impossible mixture: National pride, God and tradition are conservative ‘us’ values. The profit motive, competition and a weak state are ‘me-first’ sentiments … . But this mixture of conservative values and neoliberalism works well in America, where it transcends social class — that’s the difference to Germany.” …

David Warren contrasts the Koran non-burning and the 9/11 mosque controversy.

…Here it is worth noting that, for all his flakiness, Jones was willing to stand down. Compare Feisal Abdul Rauf, whose project to build an “Islamic cultural centre” at the edge of Ground Zero in Manhattan is offensive to a large majority of Americans and who has been made vividly aware of that fact. …

But the question for both is: “Why are you doing this?” It applies with greater force to Rauf and associates for they have been assured by almost everyone who is offended that they are welcome to build their centre anywhere else; that the issue is not religious freedom, but location, location, location.

Here we look into the deep well of hypocrisy that feeds all contemporary “progressive” thought — and which Rauf has been happily exploiting by using smooth leftist “rights” jargon in all his public utterances. The “transgressive act” is to be encouraged, imperiously, when one class of people are offended — average Americans in this case. It is to be vilified if another class of people are offended — average Muslims in the Pastor Jones case.

Remember that we are comparing a huge, permanent, symbolic building to a little passing bonfire that did not finally occur. …

Walter Russell Mead, in American Interest.com, sings Wal-Mart’s praises.

…At the risk of forfeiting any remaining elite cred I may have, let me confess: I love Walmart.  For years, every time I traveled outside New York, I descended on Walmart stores across the country.  Everything in those stores is significantly cheaper than in the hoity-toity New York department stores that want me to pay $9 and up for a “designer” undershirt.  For the price of a pair of socks in New York I can get three pairs at the average Walmart.

…As I drove my load of goodies home, I started to feel a surge of Green Guilt: the Great Wastrel staggers home in his gas-guzzling automobile stuffed with Big Box Retail productions — the enemy of everything sustainable. Shouldn’t I be riding a bio-degradable bicycle to the farmer’s market to pick up locally produced heirloom beets and carry them home in my reusable organic burlap shopping sack?

Actually, no.  Walmart and its Big Box friends are making the world a greener, more sustainable place.  This isn’t because of any PR stunts or corporate green initiatives they may have going; it’s because they are relentlessly focused on profit and efficiency.  It is their cutthroat capitalism not their sense of corporate citizenship that will save us — if anything can. …

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David Harsanyi tells conservative commentators to stay on topic and don’t get personal.

…Take the tortured contention of noted conservative author Dinesh D’Souza. In a recent Forbes cover story “How Obama Thinks” he blames the president’s “odd” blame-America-first, re-distributionist behavior on his Kenyan father’s long lost anti-colonial philosophy.

Conservatives have an opening to make an uncluttered argument — using the empirical data of a collapsing economy — that less spending, less regulation and less government is the way to create more prosperity. Dragging Third World colonialism into it — and I can say this with near certitude — is a bad idea on a number of levels.

To begin with, no decent TV-watching American has the faintest clue what you’re talking about. And worse, the spurious claims about rampant right-wing racism will now gain fresh traction. That is, I’m afraid to say, the byproduct of bringing African descent into a perfectly constructive debate about how terrible this administration has been. …

We are reminded of David Harsanyi’s excellent article featured on September 9th that Obama, and liberals, won’t offer tax cuts for everyone because that would undermine their political power. Nevertheless, it is interesting to hear some mainstream folks suggesting tax cuts to stimulate economic recovery. Noriel Roubini, in the WaPo, recommends a short-term payroll tax cut.

…A much better option is for the administration to reduce the payroll tax for two years. The reduced labor costs would lead employers to hire more; for employees, the increased take-home pay would boost much-needed economic consumption and advance the still-crucial process of deleveraging households (paying down credit card debt and other legacies of the easy-credit years).

Most policy approaches, including the Obama proposals, have tended to subsidize the demand for capital rather than the demand for labor. That has the problem backward. In the second quarter, capital spending reached an annual growth rate of 25 percent. The argument that increased demand for capital leads to greater demand for labor (i.e., if you buy more machines you need workers to run them) has not held up. Firms are investing in capital goods, equipment and offshore offices that allow them to produce the same amount of goods with less — and lower labor costs. To avoid a chronic increase in the unemployment rate, we need to subsidize the demand for labor — achieving job creation — rather than making it cheaper to buy capital, as investment and other tax credits would do.

President Obama could fully fund the reduction in payroll tax by allowing the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year to expire. Meanwhile, the Bush-era cuts affecting middle- and low-income earners — the vast majority of Americans — would remain in place for the time being. …

Thomas Sowell presents a series on words and their meanings. In the first article, Thomas Sowell brings up an important discussion. Many well-meaning people in our society have bought into the idea that some people having more wealth than others is unfair, and that government must treat people unequally in order to make up for this unfairness. Sowell argues that making everyone’s life equal is beyond the power of progressives or the scope of any kind of “social justice”.

…No wonder “social justice” has been such a political success for more than a century– and counting.

While the term has no defined meaning, it has emotionally powerful connotations. There is a strong sense that it is simply not right– that it is unjust– that some people are so much better off than others.

…Some advocates of “social justice” would argue that what is fundamentally unjust is that one person is born into circumstances that make that person’s chances in life radically different from the chances that others have– through no fault of one and through no merit of the others.

…There are individuals who were raised by parents who were both poor and poorly educated, but who pushed their children to get the education that the parents themselves never had. Many individuals and groups would not be where they are today without that.

All kinds of chance encounters– with particular people, information or circumstances– have marked turning points in many individual’s lives, whether toward fulfillment or ruin.

None of these things is equal or can be made equal. If this is an injustice, it is not a “social” injustice because it is beyond the power of society. …

In this second article, Thomas Sowell makes an important distinction between health care and medical care. He also looks at some terms that are used to justify government’s inequal treatment of citizens.

…Among the many other catchwords that shut down thinking are “the rich” and “the poor.” When is somebody rich? When they have a lot of wealth. But, when politicians talk about taxing “the rich,” they are not even talking about people’s wealth, and what they are planning to tax are people’s incomes, not their wealth.

If we stop and think, instead of going with the flow of catchwords, it is clear than income and wealth are different things. A billionaire can have zero income. Bill Gates lost $18 billion dollars in 2008 and Warren Buffett lost $25 billion. …But, no matter how low their income was, they were not poor.

By the same token, people who have worked their way up, to the point where they have a substantial income in their later years, are not rich. …A middle-aged or elderly couple making $125,000 each are not rich, even though politicians will tax away what they have earned at the end of decades of working their way up.

Similarly, most of the people who are called “the poor” are not poor. Their low incomes are as transient as the higher incomes of “the rich.” Most of the people in the bottom 20 percent in income end up in the top half of the income distribution in later years. Far more of them reach the top 20 percent than remain in the bottom 20 percent over the years. …

Thomas Sowell, in his third article, looks at the terms liberal and conservative and how ironic these terms are now.

…The late liberal Professor Tony Judt of New York University gave this definition of liberals: “A liberal is someone who opposes interference in the affairs of others: who is tolerant of dissenting attitudes and unconventional behavior.”

According to Professor Judt, liberals favor “keeping other people out of our lives, leaving individuals the maximum space in which to live and flourish as they choose.”

…Communities that have had overwhelmingly liberal elected officials for decades abound in nanny state regulations, micro-managing everything from home-building to garbage collection. …

…Liberals are usually willing to let people violate the traditional standards of the larger society but crack down on those who dare to violate liberals’ own notions and fetishes.

…Liberals often flatter themselves with having the generosity that the word implies. Many of them might be shocked to discover that Ronald Reagan donated a higher percentage of his income to charity than either Ted Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt. Nor was this unusual. Conservatives in general donate more of their income and their time to charitable endeavors and donate far more blood. …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner covers a lot of ground in his post: census numbers on poverty, UK v US handling of the fiscal crisis, and how the US needs another Reagan.

The Obama administration is bracing itself for more bad news this week with the release of stunning census figures which are projected to show the biggest increase in poverty in the United States since the 1960s. As Associated Press reports:

…Interviews with six demographers who closely track poverty trends found wide consensus that 2009 figures are likely to show a significant rate increase to the range of 14.7 percent to 15 percent. Should those estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year. It would be the highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980 when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis.

The new figures are an indictment of President Obama’s handling of the economy, and will add to the growing perception that his Big Government agenda has been a spectacular flop. Despite a huge $787 billion stimulus package (with another $50 billion in spending on the way), and a wave of public bailouts, unemployment continues to rise towards 10 percent, and the housing market remains on a downward trajectory. …

The president started attacking John Boehner two weeks ago. So, the NY Times being a loyal organ of the Dem party ran a hit piece last Sunday; front page, above the fold. A couple of the blogs we follow noticed. In the Economist’s Democracy in America Blog,  W. W. in Iowa City blogs that Congressman Boehner has received less lobby money this year than Speaker Pelosi. It is amazing how much time and effort has to be spent simply refuting liberals’ lies and distortions.

“WELL, somebody has it out for John Boehner,” I muttered to my empty kitchen as I scanned the front page of my freshly unsheathed Sunday edition of the New York Times. “A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists”, the headline read. But isn’t “tightly bound to lobbyists” packed into the very meaning “Congressman”? Presumably anticipating questions in this vein, the Times reports that “While many lawmakers in each party have networks of donors, lobbyists and former aides who now represent corporate interests, Mr. Boehner’s ties seem especially deep.” And seeming is believing, it seems, because I believed it. “Maybe the bastard has it coming,” I said to the dog, who had ambled in.

Well, I just want to say: I’m sorry, John Boehner. You’re not especially bad.

Timothey Carney, the Washington Examiner’s indispensable lobbying sleuth, today sets the record straight:

[F]rom 1999 until today, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Boehner has raised $299,490 from lobbyists. For comparison, Harry Reid, Blanche Lincoln, and Chuck Schumer have each raised more money from lobbyists in this cycle alone. This election cycle, Boehner is not even in the top 20 recipients of lobbyist cash. He’s raised less than $40,000 from lobbyists this cycle—compared to Nancy Pelosi’s $71,000 from lobbyists. Sure, Boehner is too close to lobbyists, but the money trail says he isn’t closer than Nancy Pelosi. …

John Steele Gordon also comments on the NY Times story on Boehner, in Contentions.

…The story is astonishingly thin. Are his ties to lobbyists “especially tight”? Who knows? The Times gives no examples whatever of the dealings of other Congressional leaders with lobbyists. The Times writes, “From 2000 to 2007, Mr. Boehner flew at least 45 times, often with his wife, Debbie, on corporate jets provided by companies including R. J. Reynolds. (As required, Mr. Boehner reimbursed part of the costs.)” So he didn’t do anything against House rules, apparently. But how does his aeronautical hitchhiking compare with, say, that of Steny Hoyer, the Democratic majority leader, or Sander Levin, the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee? The Times doesn’t bother to say, which raises the suspicion that Democratic leaders like flying around in private jets about as much as Republican ones do. …

…This article, which alleges no wrongdoing and gives no comparisons, is simply an attempt to further the Democrats’ plan to demonize Boehner. It is water carrying, plain and simple, proving only that the Times’s ties with the Democratic Party are especially tight.

To round all this out, in the Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden gives us accurate information about Congressman Boehner. Turns out the man the president is trying to picture as an elitist was the second of 12 children in a middle class suburban Ohio family. Of course, it took a reporter from Great Britain to find the story.

…Mr Boehner, 61, is the second of 12 who grew up in a German-Irish family in Reading, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati. All but two of them still live within a few miles of each other. Two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.

The future Congressman started work as a janitor and took seven years to get his degree – the first in the family to do so – because he had several jobs to pay his way. He joined a plastics and packaging company, rising to president before entering local politics by being elected to the town board

Bob Boehner, 62, the oldest of the 12, …said: “We were conservative because we had to be. There wasn’t the money to spend frivolously on things. We grew our own vegetables up on the hill. We learned early on that if you wanted something you had to go out and work for it.”

His brother’s childhood, he thinks, was good training for Congress, where, if he becomes Speaker, he will have 435 members to control. “He tried to make the younger ones do their homework and get the room cleaned up. He was somewhat of an authority figure to the younger ones.

“John is still an everyday person and we need more people like that in Congress because too many people there have never had a job and never had to balance a budget before.” …

Discovery.com reports on an amazing lightweight armor that may have helped Alexander the Great, in Discovery.com. Think 2,300 year old Kevlar.

A Kevlar-like armor might have helped Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) conquer nearly the entirety of the known world in little more than two decades, according to new reconstructive archaeology research.

“While we know quite a lot about ancient armor made from metal, linothorax remains something of a mystery since no examples have survived, due to the perishable nature of the material,” Gregory Aldrete, professor of history and humanistic studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, told Discovery News.

“Nevertheless, we have managed to show that this linen armor thrived as a form of body protection for nearly 1,000 years, and was used by a wide variety of ancient Mediterranean civilizations,” Aldrete said. …

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We were going to ignore the ignorant itinerant pastor from Florida cracker country, but Spengler had other ideas as he dubs Pastor Terry Jones an asymmetrical warrior.

…United States President Barack Obama, top US commander in Afghanistan General David Petraeus, the Vatican, and every talking head across the political spectrum screamed in unison until this Florida fringe preacher with a congregation that could meet in a double-wide listened, rather like Dr Seuss’ Horton hearing the Who.

Enlightened opinion prevailed, but at high cost: L’Affaire Jones demonstrated that a madman carrying a match and a copy of the Koran can do more damage to the Muslim world than a busload of suicide bombers. Leftists liked to brag during the Vietnam war that a US$10 hand grenade could destroy a $10 million plane. What’s the dollar value of the damage from a used paperback edition of the Koran, available online for a couple of dollars?

As George Packer wrote on the New Yorker website on September 10, “Reason tries in its patient, level-headed way to explain, to question, to weigh competing claims, but it can hardly make itself heard and soon gives up … One man in Gainesville who represents next to nobody triggers thousands of men around the globe who know next to nothing about it to turn violent, which triggers more violence … it’s so easy to get people to go crazy. If I wanted to, I could probably start another India-Pakistan war all by myself.” Several of the world’s intelligence services doubtless are thinking along the same lines.

Instead of trying to stabilize the Islamic world, suppose – just for the sake of argument – that one or two world powers set out to throw it into chaos. I am not advocating such a strategy, only evaluating its effectiveness.

It is a misperception that America is the main object of Muslim rage. Most Muslim rage is directed against other Muslims. Religious violence perpetrated by Muslims against other Muslims is a routine feature of life in Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Of the 1,868 acts of religious violence listed by the Global Terrorism Database, all but a handful were conducted by Muslims on Muslims. America has done its best to suppress such violence. What if America (or Russia, or India, or China) were to incite it?

The Islamic world’s claim on Western attention rests on its propensity to fail. America has spent a trillion dollars and 5,700 lives to prop up notionally pro-American regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention $2 billion a year to Egypt, and several hundred million each to Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, as well as smaller sums to other Muslim countries.

America will continue its efforts to stabilize fractious Islamic lands for the foreseeable future. Obama holds a personal as well as an ideological commitment to foster friendship with the Muslim world, and the Republicans will not admit that they were mistaken to commit so much blood and treasure to nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. … 

Conn Carroll at The Heritage Foundation makes excellent points about the totalitarian dictates of a government bureaucrat.

…Never before in the history of our republican form of government has an administration threatened to extinguish individual firms for merely communicating with their customers. But such are the dictatorial powers Obamacare grants to Secretary Sebelius. There are over 1,000 instances in the more than 2,700 page bill where Congress granted Secretary Sebelius new powers to regulate the health care industry. For example, her power to “determine” what does or does not count as a medical expense alone will decide the fate of many health insurance firms.

Is this the type of government our Founders intended our federal government to become? No. Hillsdale College Associate Professor of Political Science Ronald Pestritto explains:

The Founders understood that there are two fundamental ways in which government can exercise its authority. The first is a system of arbitrary rule, where the government decides how to act on an ad hoc basis, leaving decisions up to the whim of whatever official or officials happen to be in charge; the second way is to implement a system grounded in the rule of law, where legal rules are made in advance and published, binding both government and citizens and allowing the latter to know exactly what they have to do or not to do in order to avoid the coercive authority of the former.

Secretary Sebelius’ Hugo Chavezesque threats against the health insurance industry demonstrate why the fight to repeal Obamacare is also the fight for the soul of our country. Obamacare and the progressive movement represent a fundamental threat to our founding principles. For the left, “progress” means fundamentally transforming America through bureaucratic dictates that will engineer a “better” society by assuring equal outcomes. Through Obamacare, progressives would redistribute wealth through a distant, patronizing welfare state that regulates more and more of the economy, politics and society. The question Americans face is: Are we a country ruled by law or by bureaucrat?

In the Atlantic Blogs, Megan McArdle blogs about the risk of no-money-down, in light of a new Fannie Mae program.

CNBC’s John Carney adds “…The arguments for the program are not really persuasive. Adjustable rate loans are not the primary drivers of defaults–the primary driver is the combination of borrowers who have negative equity and expect that the value of their home will not appreciate soon. This means that no money down home loans are particularly dangerous–regardless of how vigorously lenders counsel homeowners or screen for credit scores.”

I’m not sure I quite agree with Carney’s assessment.  It’s absolutely true that having negative equity is a better predictor of default than things like unemployment.  But while many people have interpreted this to mean that negative equity makes you likely to strategically default, it’s not clear to me that that is actually very widespread.  It’s just as plausible–perhaps more so–that having negative equity makes you much more vulnerable to negative income shocks, because you can’t sell the house or refinance when something bad happens.

But either way, having negative equity is very, very dangerous.  And that’s what a no-money-down borrower has in this market, because prices aren’t rising much, and they need to find thousands of dollars to pay broker commissions and closing costs if they want to sell.

What truly boggles the mind is that the government still thinks that it’s somehow a good idea to help push people with basically no savings into homeownership.  Do they want to make sure that a whole new class of financially marginal people can enjoy the benefits of foreclosure?

Steve Malanga is in the WSJ discussing a hopeful trend building against public-sector unions.

…The backlash against public unions has gone beyond heavily unionized states like California and New Jersey. One illustration is the finding of a July 7 national Rasmussen poll: Only 19% of Americans said that they would be willing to pay higher taxes to keep government workers from being laid off. Even in public safety, where Americans are sometimes reluctant to see cutbacks, the poll found only 34% endorsed higher taxes to preserve police and fire jobs.

The electorate may also be turning away from public unions because of their relentless campaigning for higher taxes. … In California, the teachers union has kicked in $500,000 as part of a campaign to rescind business tax breaks to keep jobs in the state. Last year in Michigan, a coalition of unions engineered a campaign called “A Better Michigan Future” that advocated hundreds of millions in new taxes, which the state legislature rejected.

The prospect of ever-higher taxes has Democrats distancing themselves from labor. New York Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo is preaching fiscal prudence and says public pensions are “out of line with economic reality.” In California, old allies of labor like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (who was once a teachers union official) are also inveighing against the cost imposed by public unions. Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski, an attorney who once represented unions, is advocating clamping down on public-sector pay and benefits to fix that state’s budget problems.

Unions are also on the defensive in the culture wars. Later this month the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” about the failings of our public schools, will debut in theaters nationwide. The film is directed by Davis Guggenheim, who earned impeccable liberal credentials as the director of the Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth.” His new documentary, say reviewers who’ve seen it, places a chunk of the blame for the woes of our schools on teachers unions and in particular paints Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, as an opponent of meaningful reform. …

Roger Simon tells us about a new book written by three Republican congressmen who want to make changes.

Campaign books are almost never “high literature,” nor are they usually intended to be.  And no one would mistake Young Guns:  A New Generation of Conservative Leaders for de Toqueville’s Democracy in America, but the new book (published tomorrow) by Congressmen Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy is the next best thing to a classic.  It is a war cry.

This war cry is not just the predictable excoriation of the failed liberal Democratic policies of Barack Obama, but a striking attack by the three Republican congressmen on their own party for having violated the small government principles upon which they were elected. If the Tea Party movement is looking for leadership, it may be sitting there in plain sight with Cantor, Ryan and McCarthy.

…Of course, these three gentlemen could be accused at this point of being career politicians themselves, but they clearly understand this contradiction, are airing it publicly, and struggling to stay principled.

The bulk of the short book continues with three longish essays, each by one of the authors.  They are essentially narratives of their recent experiences in Congress interspersed with their political views. …

In the NRO, Kevin Williamson comments on the young guns.

…Ryan, who has been one of the few sane voices on the debt for some time now, says he expects the new crop of Republicans expected to be sworn in come January to be a rowdy bunch, with little respect for the seniority system or traditional congressional politics. Cantor, too, made it clear that he knows they are in for a long-term fight — no magic-bullet solutions were under consideration. McCarthy was the surprise for me, though — I did not know much about him and was impressed by his command of the data, relating both to politics and policy.

I have been, and remain, skeptical of congressional Republicans’ ability to head off Fiscal Armageddon; the political incentives are all wrong, and it probably will take a major economic crisis to realign those incentives. But I am a little less skeptical today than I was yesterday — maybe 5 percent less. I think there is a non-trivial chance that non-entitlement spending could be scaled back to 2008 levels — not exactly raging austerity, but a start; combined with sane entitlement reform and tax reform, that could get us several steps back from the ledge we’re on. Something good seems to be afoot among Republicans.

Here’s what to worry about: Chances are, the economy is still going to stink in January 2011. It may be worse then than it is today — and it is possible that it will be significantly worse. Ryan is worried about the dollar, and he is right to be. If things get really hideous economically, then there is going to be tremendous political pressure on the GOP to do the dumb thing that Republicans always do: cut the taxes and let the spending grow. That could happen. We can’t let it. …

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In case all of the news is getting you down, David Goldman has the top ten reasons the world is not coming to an end.

Japanese-style stagnation, not economic collapse, is the most likely scenario for the US. Harrisburg, PA and Greece may go down the drain (and maybe even California and New York City and Illinois), but that’s not the end of the world. It’s just the end of them.

10) China’s controlled growth deceleration is doing reasonably well, according to Cantor Fitzgerald’s Asia strategist Uwe Parpart, my old Bank of America colleague.

9) China’s banks may be choking on bad loans, but China’s massive foreign exchange reserves can cover the problem out of petty cash and rounding error.

8) Southeast Asia continues to grow, with local stock exchanges up about 20% year to date.

7) India is doing well. Add up these first four items and half the world’s population is doing just fine. …

Bret Stephens comments on anti-Semitism in Europe.

…Earlier this month, Karel De Gucht, the European Union’s trade commissioner and a former foreign minister of Belgium, gave an interview to a Flemish radio station in which he offered the view that the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were sure to founder on two accounts: first, because Jews are excessively influential in the U.S; second, because they are not the sorts to be reasoned with. …

…consider that last year the Anti-Defamation League conducted a survey of European attitudes toward Jews in seven different countries. Do Jews have “too much power in the business world”? In France, 33% said this was “probably true”; in Spain it was 56%. Were Jews to some degree responsible for the global economic crisis? In Germany, 30% thought so; in Austria, 43% did. A separate 2008 Pew Survey also found that 25% of Germans, 36% of Poles and 46% of Spaniards had a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable opinion of Jews. …

In the Telegraph, UK, James Delingpole wraps an interesting article around a stunning confession from Fidel Castro.

…Over lunch with Atlantic magazine correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, the Cuban dictator confessed: “The Cuban model doesn’t really work for us any more.” Unable to believe his ears, Goldberg asked one of his neighbours, a Latin American expert, to interpret this extraordinary statement. She explained: “He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgement that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”

Hmm. Sounds very much like a “rejection of the Revolution” to me. And if indeed it was, then it must come pretty close to being a historical first. Did Mao ever express any regrets about the 20 million who died during his Great Leap Forward? Was Stalin ever moved to tears over the millions more who were shot in the back of the head by his secret police or froze and starved in his Gulags? Of course not. That’s the thing about Leftist ideologues. Whether they’re major league mass murderers such as Pol Pot or simply pathological destroyers of economies like Gordon Brown, they usually remain in a state of blissful self-delusion right to the bitter end. …

…It’s nice, obviously, that the cigar-smoking beardie has finally had the grace to acknowledge the error of his ways. But shouldn’t he have worked this out 50 years earlier, and spared the poor Cuban people a heap of communist misery?

John Fund tells how the president is letting D.C. kids down. Government by a faculty lounge ideologue.

Education reformers will be watching Washington D.C.’s Democratic primary for mayor today. Incumbent Adrian Fenty is trailing Vincent Gray, the chair of D.C.’s City Council, in a race that is turning into a referendum on the shake-up of the local public schools by Michelle Rhee, the Fenty-appointed schools chief.

A Washington City Paper poll found that 53% of voters believe her tenure is a major issue in the campaign. Since she took charge of the D.C. schools in 2007, Ms. Rhee has fired poorly performing teachers, linked teacher pay to performance, and tried to shut down schools that continually fail to improve. She is almost certain to lose her job should Mr. Gray, who is supported by teacher unions, win today.

…President Obama spoke highly of Ms. Rhee and Mr. Fenty, one of his earliest supporters, during the 2008 campaign. But he has been largely AWOL from the Democratic race for mayor, even though it’s taking place in his backyard.

“The president should have said something in support of Fenty,” Juan Williams, a journalist with NPR and the author of books on the civil rights movement, told the Daily Caller. Mr. Fenty himself said last week that he had asked Mr. Obama for help, although he didn’t expect much to materialize. D.C. Councilman Jim Graham, a Fenty backer, added that Mr. Obama “could have won the election for Adrian” and made sure Ms. Rhee had time to finish her important work. Mr. Obama talks a good game on education reform, telling an audience recently that “the status quo in education is unacceptable.” But when he had a chance to make a difference and ensure the continuance of education reform in the nation’s capital, he did the functional equivalent of what he did over 140 times while serving in the Illinois legislature: identify himself as only being “present.”

Ed Morrissey remarks on one part of Obamacare being repealed. It makes you wonder who convinced Obama and all the other liberals to eat crow.

The momentum to repeal ObamaCare picked up a little momentum in an unlikely place: the White House.  After facing a deluge of criticism for new tax records mandates that threaten to drown both the IRS and small businesses, Congress finally scheduled an attempt to remove that portion of the new law.  Yesterday, the Obama administration quietly asked Democrats to expedite the process and eliminate the 1099 requirements…

…The media may have missed it, but we’ve been talking about this for at least eleven months.  Cato reminded everyone about it in April, and yet it has taken five months for the White House to conclude that it will create huge costs and administrative burdens for business and the IRS alike.

Had this bill been processed normally through committees and debated honestly, this flaw would have gotten immediate attention. Instead, the ObamaCare bill got written in back rooms, rushed to the floor of both chambers, instead of developed in the normal process.  The excuse was that it was too important to get vetted, and too time-critical to delay it or pass it in components.  Well, this is what happens when Congressional leadership says that they have to pass a bill to find out what’s in it, and when they drop 2800 pages of legislative text on members just 48 hours before floor votes. …

…Let’s just reflect on the fact that Democrats now claim that they backed a bill in the face of overwhelming opposition from voters, and now say they didn’t understand it when they did.   And instead of cutting the spending in the bill, Democrats insist on raising taxes to cover their own mistake.  If that’s not an election-year ad, I don’t know what is.

We have another post from Ed Morrissey on a Senate seat that everyone thought was safely in the Dem column.

Try to remember than six months ago, almost everyone wrote off the Senate race in Connecticut after Richard Blumenthal replaced the retiring Chris Dodd in the race.  Democrats practically own Connecticut, and Republicans would be foolish to spend money on a race that Blumenthal should have won by twenty or more points.  Fortunately for the GOP, it had self-funding candidate Linda McMahon — and a gaffe-prone Democrat — in a cycle that should erase any notion of safe seats.  Quinnipiac’s latest poll shows McMahon within six points of the lead…

…With seven weeks to go, McMahon appears to be gaining momentum, and perhaps in part because of the experience argument.  It’s an open seat, but Blumenthal represents the Democratic Party establishment in a cycle uniquely hostile to that very entity.  His multiple gaffes and exposure of dishonest statements has eroded his standing in Connecticut, although not yet to the point where he has sunk below 51% among likely voters.  McMahon has run a smart campaign, but the difference in this race is that Connecticut voters got a lot more acquainted with Blumenthal than they had in previous elections.

That 51% is still enough to win the seat, and McMahon is still an underdog, but this is a winnable race for Republicans.

David Warren takes on an interesting challenge.

…A cynical operator treats humans like dogs. Instead of reasoning with them, he manipulates with treats, and soothing words; or by invoking bogeymen, arousing fears, and pulling on their bureaucratic leashes. He teaches them to heel, stand, sit, sit and stay, fetch, beg. And all the while pretending to be humble; “the dog’s best friend.”

…The political equivalent is, “Vote for me, and you will feel good about yourself.” You’ll be caring and sharing, much more intelligent, in with the winners, and cool, way cool. Vote for the other guy and all you’ll ever get is some miserable tax cut. And you’ll feel like such a dork. …

…Mass manipulation wouldn’t be possible without people organized into a mass, and the means of delivering messages to them through mass media. Our democracy today is mass democracy, something almost infinitely removed from the original Greek idea, of democracy on the direct, personal scale. …

…In articles to come, God willing, I want to wrestle with what I believe to be our greatest political challenge: how to dismantle our morally and fiscally bankrupt “mass democracy” — or “bobblehead democracy,” if you will. And, how to return to the kind in which the citizen himself participates in decisions directly and personally.

And we have four posts from one of our favorites, Jennifer Rubin.

A new requirement for elected office is needed. How about ten years experience in the private sector, before you can make life miserable for the people that create or hold real jobs? Perhaps that would inject some sanity into government policies. Jennifer Rubin reports on the economic effects of the tragic stupidity from our current elected officials.

To all but the Democrats and the class-warfare mongers (I repeat myself), this comes as no surprise:

“The uncertainty over looming tax increases is starting to affect both investing and corporate decision-making.

The economy remains the biggest factor in many investors’ and businesses’ decisions. But worries over whether Congress will extend some of the expiring Bush-era tax breaks are emerging as another important one. … Small-business owners say unease about tax policy, along with the economy, has led them to hold off on hiring and investment. And many advisers are encouraging well-to-do clients to sell appreciated assets to avoid higher capital-gains taxes.”

Until Obama offered a round of business tax cuts, the Democrats had operated as if tax policy had a negligible impact on employment and investment. So they were “stumped” when jobs didn’t materialize. Lo and behold — who knew? — businesses are getting ready for the tax hit by hiring fewer workers:

If the administration had an entrepreneur or two in its ranks, if there were not merely pols and academicians populating the White House, someone might have seen this coming. But we have a president and a vice president who have never run anything, let alone a profitmaking enterprise, not to mention political hacks like David Axelrod who froth with contempt for “Wall Street” (i.e., those who supply and manage capital). So they are amazed that all their handiwork has indeed paralyzed employers.

It’s exactly what you figured would happen if a leftist law professor wound up in the Oval Office.

Rubin slams Christiane Amanpour for her bias and lack of professionalism.

In addition to her softball interview with Imam Abdul Rauf on This Week,  Christiane Amanpour hosted a panel on the state of Islam. … All three of the panelists were pro–Ground Zero. Even worse, Amanpour — with not a shred of evidence — claimed that mosque opponents are taking the position that al-Qaeda is building the Ground Zero mosque. Huh? Is anyone making that argument? She also takes as fact that the Ground Zero incident was ”whipped up by certain political interests.”

This sort of performance merely reinforces the perception that Amanpour plays fast and loose with the facts. And let’s get real — there is more than sloppiness at play here. …

…As a colleague with mainstream-news experience observed recently, it is hard to “believe ABC expects to hold or build an audience this way.” Maybe an MSNBC shouting-heads show would be up her alley — but a serious Sunday network talk show? At some point I suspect that the ABC brain trust will have to admit error and get her out of there.

Rubin shares Beltway talk on Pelosi’s demise.

Democrats aren’t waiting for the election returns to start planning Nancy Pelosi’s ouster. Politico reports:

…“This is a subject that everybody in town is thinking about,” said a former House Democrat who keeps close contact with his former colleagues. …

“If we lose it badly, Pelosi would have to leave, as might the whole leadership team,” said a veteran House Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I can see Hoyer becoming Minority Leader. And I can imagine that Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) would stay as Whip, but then retire. They could become transitional leaders as we look for new leadership. It would have to sort itself out.”

Pelosi may have peaked on the day she assumed office, as an identity-politics champion. In four years she’s helped drive her party into the ground and our country deeper and deeper into debt. Rather than draining the swamp, she’s coddled corrupt pols. Her “historic” achievement — ramming through ObamaCare — may turn to dust as states opt out of the individual mandate and a new Congress defunds and then sets out to repeal the measure. Come to think of it, that may be Obama’s legacy as well.

And Rubin blogs how the Left has lost that lovin’ feeling.

Obama’s public persona is so predictable and his image so overexposed that even the left is over him. He’s gone from fascinating and cool to a crashing bore in less than two years. … Maureen Dowd: “How did the first president of color become so colorless?”

…Why are liberals so bored all of a sudden? … There are, I think, several things at work.

First, style — that “superior temperament” and the coolness — was what attracted many urban liberals to him in the first place. Obama was in essence the latest trend, equivalent to this season’s fashion or the newest cell phone, which they had to have. But trends by definition come and go, and surface impressions and infatuation don’t last long.

Second, it is easier to admit that the candidate they swooned for is boring than it is to say he’s incompetent (or an empty suit). The former implies that Obama has lost his charm, the latter suggests that their own judgment was faulty. This also neatly sidesteps the troubling matter that Obama’s policies have tanked. (If he could only be more eloquent about the trillions spent, the public wouldn’t dessert him, the thinking goes.) …

Investor’s Business Daily editors jeer the 2007 Congress for destroying jobs, unnecessarily increasing costs for taxpayers, and perpetuating a green hoax.

Eco-Extremism: A light bulb factory closes in Virginia as mandated fluorescents are made in China. It’s now a crime to make or ship for sale 75-watt incandescent bulbs in the European Union. Welcome to green hell.

…The General Electric light bulb factory in Winchester, Va., closed this month, a victim, along with its 200 employees, of a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014.

…Washington’s force and coercion are necessary because it seems the great unwashed can’t seem to see the benefits or ignore the risks of compact fluorescents, or CFLs.

…It’s said that CFL bulbs are more economical in the long run because they supposedly use up to 80% less energy than old-style bulbs and don’t burn out as quickly. Though we’re not fully convinced of these claims, we do know that CFL bulbs are more expensive, costing up to six times as much as equivalent incandescent bulbs. Because they are made of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they also require more hand labor and therefore cost more. …

…Despite governments’ effort to market them, CFLs are not necessarily better. Tests conducted by the London Telegraph found that using a single lamp to illuminate a room, an 11-watt CFL produced only 58% of the illumination of an equivalent 60-watt incandescent — even after a 10-minute warm-up that consumers have found necessary for CFLs to reach their full brightness.

And in his blog, Don Surber matches Simpsons’ characters to the president and his minions.

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Jennifer Rubin compares some of President Bush’s 9/11 speeches to Obama’s recent speech. Rubin picked several Bush excerpts that are particularly moving.

It may have been his finest speech, revealing both his character and ours. … George W. Bush on September 14, 2001:

“In this trial, we have been reminded, and the world has seen, that our fellow Americans are generous and kind, resourceful and brave. We see our national character in rescuers working past exhaustion; in long lines of blood donors; in thousands of citizens who have asked to work and serve in any way possible. And we have seen our national character in eloquent acts of sacrifice. Inside the World Trade Center, one man who could have saved himself stayed until the end at the side of his quadriplegic friend. A beloved priest died giving the last rites to a firefighter. Two office workers, finding a disabled stranger, carried her down sixty-eight floors to safety. A group of men drove through the night from Dallas to Washington to bring skin grafts for burn victims.

In these acts, and in many others, Americans showed a deep commitment to one another, and an abiding love for our country. Today, we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called the warm courage of national unity. This is a unity of every faith, and every background. It is evident in services of prayer and candlelight vigils and American flags, which are displayed in pride and waved in defiance. Our unity is a kinship of grief and a steadfast resolve to prevail against our enemies. And this unity against terror is now extending across the world. …”

George Will brings up a startling fact about the Depression.

…Hoover — against whom Democrats, those fountains of fresh ideas, have been campaigning for 78 years — is again being invoked as a terrible warning about the wages of sin. Sin is understood by liberals as government austerity, which is understood as existing levels of government spending…

Real per capita federal expenditures almost doubled between 1929, Hoover’s first year as president, and 1932, his last. David Kennedy, in “Freedom from Fear,” the volume in the Oxford history of the American people that deals with the Depression, writes of Hoover:

“He nearly doubled federal public works expenditures in three years. Thanks to his prodding, the net stimulating effect of federal, state and local fiscal policy was larger in 1931 than in any subsequent year of the decade.” …

Obamacare continues to bring out the worst totalitarian instincts in our ‘public servants’. Michael Barone comments on one government official who needs to be removed from her post.

…Secretary Sebelius objects to claims by health insurers that they are raising premiums because of increased costs imposed by the Obamacare law passed by Congress last March.

…And there’s a threat. “We will also keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases: Those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014.”

…Sebelius is threatening to put health insurers out of business in a substantial portion of the market if they state that Obamacare is boosting their costs.

“Congress shall make no law,” reads the First Amendment, “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

…The threat to use government regulation to destroy or harm someone’s business because they disagree with government officials is thuggery. Like the Obama administration’s transfer of money from Chrysler bondholders to its political allies in the United Auto Workers, it is a form of gangster government. …

Ed Morrissey also comments on Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ trouble respecting the Constitution.

…Rarely have we heard a Cabinet official tell Americans to stay out of political debates at the risk of losing their businesses.  It points out the danger in having government run industries and holding a position where politicians can actually destroy a business out of spite.  It also demonstrates the thin skin of our current administration, where Hope and Change means keeping your mouth shut and pretending that everyone is happy while businesses slowly circle the drain. …

The WSJ Editors weigh in on the government bullying.

…Witness Kathleen Sebelius’s Thursday letter to America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group—a thuggish message even by her standards. The Health and Human Services secretary wrote that some insurers have been attributing part of their 2011 premium increases to ObamaCare and warned that “there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases.”

Zero tolerance for expressing an opinion, or offering an explanation to policyholders? They’re more subtle than this in Caracas. …

Ed Morrissey has a less threatening, yet still amazingly stupid, quote from Sebelius.

…Yesterday, when addressing the strong opposition to ObamaCare throughout the nation, Sebelius chalked it up to ignorance and misinformation — and suggested a remedy that sounds as if it came out of Orwell, emphasis mine:

“Unfortunately, there still is a great deal of confusion about what is in [the reform law] and what isn’t,” Sebelius told ABC News Radio in an interview Monday.

With several vulnerable House Democrats touting their votes against the bill, and Republicans running on repeal, Sebelius said “misinformation given on a 24/7 basis” has led to the enduring opposition nearly six months after the lengthy debate ended in Congress.

“So, we have a lot of reeducation to do,” Sebelius said.

The administration is particularly concerned about the views of senior citizens – who “have been a target of a lot of the misinformation,” according to the health secretary.

“Re-education” has been a favorite effort by tyrannies over the past century or so, mainly (but not exclusively) communist.  The most notorious programs came in China, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the latter of which produced the mass exodus of “boat people” to the US and other countries.  “Re-education” has come to mean either brainwashing or intimidation of political dissidents. …

Mort Zuckerman discusses how the government has taken care of its own, at the expense, literally and figuratively, of taxpayers’ standard of living. He suggests a couple ways to start taking control back from the government class.

…Political tension is bound to grow when jobs disappear faster in the private than the public sector, just as compensation in the former is squeezed more. There was a time when government work offered lower salaries than comparable jobs in the private sector, a difference for which the public sector compensated by providing more security and better benefits. No longer. These days, government employees are better off in almost every area: pay, benefits, time off and security, on top of working fewer hours. Public workers have become a privileged class – an elite who live better than their private-sector counterparts. Public servants have become the public’s masters.

Take federal employees. For nine years in a row, they have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private-sector workers. In 2008, the average wage for 1.9m federal civilian workers was more than $79,000, against an average of about $50,000 for the nation’s 108m private-sector workers, measured in full-time equivalents. Ninety per cent of government employees receive lifetime pension benefits versus 18 per cent of private employees. Public service employees continue to gain annual salary increases; they retire earlier with instant, guaranteed benefits paid for with the taxes of those very same private-sector workers. ,,,

…The only fair solution is to take the politicians out of the equation and have fully independent commissions in charge, fixing the scale of salaries and benefits for public-service workers and establishing an affordable second retirement tier for new employees. More reasonable retirement ages should be in order, such as 65 for general employees and 55 for public safety employees. This would take nothing away from the existing benefits of current employees.

A fundamental rethinking of the public workforce is necessary. Americans cannot maintain their essential faith in government if there are two Americas, in which the private sector subsidizes the disproportionate benefits of this new public sector elite.

Jonah Goldberg writes about the complexity, efficiency, and miraculous results of free markets.

…In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, “I, Pencil.” It begins, “I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.” It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”

…To make a long story short, the simple act of collecting and combining the ingredients of a pencil involves the cooperation of thousands of experts in dozens of fields, from engineering and mining to chemistry and commodity trading. I suppose it’s possible for someone to master all of the knowledge and expertise to make a pencil all by himself, but why would he?

The lessons one can draw from this fact are humbling. For starters, any healthy civilization, never mind any healthy economy, involves unfathomably vast amounts of harmonious cooperation.

…the modern market economy is the greatest communal enterprise ever undertaken in the history of humanity. Friedrich Hayek did the heavy lifting on this point over half a century ago in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The efficient pricing of markets allows millions of independent actors to decide for themselves how to allocate resources. According to Hayek, no central planner or bureaucrat could ever have enough knowledge to consistently and successfully guide all of those economic actions in a more efficient manner. …

Greg Mankiw’s Blog discusses an interesting scheme by some academicians. It is just one of the many ways rent control in NY city provides typical unintended consequences of intervention in free markets.

… In the end, the goal of the rent control laws is thwarted (the low rents are enjoyed by well-paid tenured faculty rather than the needy), the income tax laws are thwarted (a sizable part of compensation is untaxed), and all this is done by a nonprofit institution (the university) whose ostensible purpose is to serve the public interest. 

The attitude in Greece is worse than you’ve heard. Stephen Spruiell blogs in the Corner about a terrible incident.

Michael Lewis has written one of his impossible-to-stop-reading pieces on the intersection of human eccentricity and high finance, and his target this time is the nation of Greece. There’s way too much good stuff in the piece to pull out one key quote or graf, but in the midst of all the black humor I found this excerpt just plain sobering:

“Here is Greece’s version of the Tea Party: tax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don’t really teach, well-paid employees of bankrupt state railroads whose trains never run on time, state hospital workers bribed to buy overpriced supplies. Here they are, and here we are: a nation of people looking for anyone to blame but themselves. The Greek public-sector employees assemble themselves into units that resemble army platoons. In the middle of each unit are two or three rows of young men wielding truncheons disguised as flagpoles. Ski masks and gas masks dangle from their belts so that they can still fight after the inevitable tear gas. “The deputy prime minister has told us that they are looking to have at least one death,” a prominent former Greek minister had told me. “They want some blood.” Two months earlier, on May 5, during the first of these protest marches, the mob offered a glimpse of what it was capable of. Seeing people working at a branch of the Marfin Bank, young men hurled Molotov cocktails inside and tossed gasoline on top of the flames, barring the exit. Most of the Marfin Bank’s employees escaped from the roof, but the fire killed three workers, including a young woman four months pregnant. As they died, Greeks in the streets screamed at them that it served them right, for having the audacity to work. The events took place in full view of the Greek police, and yet the police made no arrests.”

It is a sharp contrast to the kind of things that happen when members of our Tea Party get together in large numbers, as well as a vivid reminder that we do not want to find out the hard way what happens when we reach our credit limit.

John J. Miller posts on a little-known fact in the Corner.

A long article in the NYT Mag asks why young people take so long to grow up these days. In the middle of it, we discover the hiding-in-plain-sight wisdom of car-rental companies:

Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into the 20s. This new understanding comes largely from a longitudinal study of brain development sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, which started following nearly 5,000 children at ages 3 to 16 (the average age at enrollment was about 10). The scientists found the children’s brains were not fully mature until at least 25. “In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking, but it was at the time,” Jay Giedd, the director of the study, told me. “The only people who got this right were the car-rental companies.”

Hat tip: Joseph Asch of Dartblog.

And we have NRO Shorts. Here’s one:

The economy may not have double-dipped, but the housing market has — with a vengeance. After rallying earlier this year in response to a tax credit that subsidized home purchases to the tune of $8,000, it has plunged again with the expiration of the credit, and plunged much faster and farther than expected: July’s numbers for new and existing home sales were some of the worst ever recorded. The easy explanation for this is that the tax credit pulled forward summer demand into spring, and the homebuyers who would have bought this summer have already bought homes. This explanation is true as far as it goes, but it comes with an unpleasant addendum: The bubble sent housing prices into the stratosphere, and they still look artificially high. The administration’s misguided policies benefited the Democrats, at least in the short run, and also helped banks that needed a break from foreclosures. But they have delayed the market’s recovery.

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In the National Review, Jim Geraghty asks Scott Rasmussen some interesting questions about polling.

…GERAGHTY: Have you ever re-polled a race after getting results that didn’t sit well with your gut?

RASMUSSEN: We release the data and then we go poll it again if something is going on. There are two races right now where I am very curious about what our next polls will show, one in West Virginia and one in Alaska. In both cases, I can come up with a logical argument as to why the numbers are the way they are; I can also come up with a logical argument as to why they show the race as closer than it really is. But we want to get the information out there and let other people engage in that discussion, and we’ll poll again and see where it ends up. …

…GERAGHTY: Can Republicans blow it in the last two months?

RASMUSSEN: It depends on how you define “blow it.” Is it possible that they will blow it to such extent that this ends up being just a “normal” midterm, with the Democrats losing 15 to 20 seats? No, I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think that they’re going to have only minimal gains in the Senate. But how close they get to gaining control of the Senate and whether or not they gain control of the House, that’s still up in the air. But that ultimately has less to do with Republicans than with Democrats, because this election is all about the party in power.

This election is a referendum on the Democrats — it’s not a referendum on incumbents as much as on the Democratic party. We put out a poll last week that I think captures some of the basic mood. Most Americans believe, as they have for decades, that cutting government spending and cutting taxes is good for the economy. That’s just sort of a bedrock belief of the American people. At the same time, they believe that the Democrats in Congress want to increase spending and increase taxes. That creates a tough road when you’re the party in power, when you’ve got that kind of perception out there. …

In Powerline, Paul Mirengoff has a disturbing story that needs investigation.

Bill Otis, at the Crime and Consequences blog, notes an under-reported aspect of the story of Rev. Terry Jones plan (which he subsequently called off) to burn the Koran. It is this: FBI agents visited Rev. Jones shortly before he changed his mind about the book burning.

The AP story about the FBI’s visit linked it to concern about public safety. But, as Bill observes, any reasonable public safety concern stemming from the action of Rev. Jones and his church would have only a local dimension — i.e., retaliation against him and his church. Thus, Bill, a former federal prosecutor, concludes that there is “no visible nexus whatever for FBI involvement.”

This raises the suspicion that the FBI visit was an attempt to intimidate Rev. Jones. A vist for this purpose would be an entirely improper infringement on his (and by extension our) civil liberties.

I had no sympathy for Jones’ plan to plan the Koran — better that Americans should read the book and evaluate the relationship between its words and the behavior of jihadists. But Jones has a constitutionally protected right to do what he was planning to do, and the FBI should not throw its weight around attempting to “persuade” Jones not to exercise that right. …

Peter Wehner shares interesting commentary on a number of issues regarding Obama’s recent speeches. We highlight the most surprising:

…And what is striking is how Obama, under growing political pressure, increasingly feels sorry for himself. “They talk about me like a dog,” the president told a crowd in Wisconsin earlier this week. “That’s not in my prepared remarks, it’s just — but it’s true.” And echoing the remarks made this morning by his top aide David Axelrod — who insisted “we didn’t create the mess we’re in” — Obama in his Cleveland speech said, “When I walked in [to the White House], wrapped in a nice bow, was a $1.3 trillion deficit sitting on my door step — a welcoming present.”

What’s so revealing about Obama is that comments about how terribly unfair life has been for him since he assumed office are extemporaneous, off the cuff, from the heart. For example, neither Obama’s claim that “they talk about me like a dog” nor his statement in Cleveland about his “welcoming present” were in the prepared text. …

What we are seeing, then, is Barack Obama unplugged. …

“This is more than an inconvenience,” David Axelrod wrote in a memo to Obama on November 28, 2006, in raising concerns about Obama’s thin skin. “It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. … ” …

Ed Driscoll, in Pajamas Media, comments on recent Obama gaffes, including the misattributed quote on the Oval Office rug.

…The error perfectly encapsulates the shallowness of Barack Obama’s intellect and his lack of rigor. Obama is a man who accumulated academic credentials while giving no evidence whatsoever of achieving any depth. He was the only president of the Harvard Law Review to graduate without penning a signed article in that esteemed journal. His academic transcripts remain under lock and key, as do his academic papers. …

…For some reason or other, Obama has been able to skate through academia and politics without ever being seriously challenged to prove his depth. A simple veneer of glibness has been enough to win the accolades of the liberal intelligentsia. But now that he has actual responsibilities — including relatively trivial ones like custodianship of the inner sanctum of the presidency — his lack of substance keeps showing up in visible, embarrassing, and troubling ways. …

Also in Pajamas Media, Alex Knepper discusses character and the president’s performance.

…It’s been said that some people ascend to the presidency because they want to do something, while others fight for the job because they want to be someone. That is: some men come into the office captured by a vision of what the world should look like — Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan can be counted among them — while others, usually less consequential, want to be president simply because it’s another notch in their belt. Think George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (and Mitt Romney). The tea party movement thinks that Obama is in the former camp: that he is trying to remake America in a socialist image. They are wrong. Men with a vision don’t let the cries of protesters shake their poise. Rather, they tend to believe, much like George W. Bush did, that the course of history will vindicate their choices. Obama, interestingly, seems not to believe this. Instead — and this is not just bad for the Democrats, but for the country — he is panicking.

Obama came into office drunk on his own hype. He thought that he was bigger than the job; that his charisma and cool alone could shape history. (“This campaign is about you,” his campaign’s website said. That’s a good tip-off: whenever someone says that it’s not about them, it’s always, always about them.) …

…Alas, the charade, beautiful as it was, couldn’t hold. Obama has found that the inertia of his oratory won’t budge that stubbornly persistent unemployment rate. The Taliban doesn’t care one whit about his being the first black president. … Abroad, the narrative of history won’t vanish the problems of the here and now. Domestically, the institutions are too much for the man’s arsenal of verbiage. Our civic traditions are too entrenched to be knocked down by one man, however important he thinks he is. The system, after all, is designed to stop change that’s too rapid. Trying to steamroll your agenda through is, historically speaking, a pretty inept way of getting something done. That’s what our separation of powers is all about. “Party of No” is no misnomer — a strong opposition party is vital to a potent republic. Criticism of the powerful must be unrelenting. If the agenda is strong enough, it will withstand the force of the assault. Obama’s simply upset that his agenda can’t withstand such a withering attack.

Poor Obama… He simply has no idea what to do. Such a neophyte is he — both in practice and in worldview — that he is actually flabbergasted that his critics speak harshly of him. This is, I’m sorry to say, total amateur hour. But he is, after all, an amateur. …

William Jacobson dissects Obama’s Labor Day speech, in Legal Insurrection, and what it reveals about Obama’s thinking.

…But you really need to read the entire speech.  It is classic Obama, living in a time warp, declaring that unions are the past and the future of prosperity, and focusing on large infrastructure programs as if this were the 1930s. 

The entrepreneurs and workers who built the great technology companies that drive our economy are nowhere to be found.  It is the proletariat of the old economy who live in Obama’s imagination.

But what was most Obama-like about the speech was the launching of vicious attacks on his opponents, only to then cry foul over the fact that his opponents push back. Obama, as he did throughout the campaign and has done throughout his presidency, painted a picture of his political opponents as heartless victimizers of others, and of the capitalist system as cruel and inhumane. …

Glenn Reynolds passes on reader Hugh Akston’s recommendation to Obama on how to proceed.

I think its time for President Obama to pull a “Costanza”. Remember the Seinfeld episode when George realized that every decision he ever made had been wrong? Then he decided to do the opposite of what he thought he should do. He ended up with an awesome job with the Yankees, dating a great girl, and moving out of his parents’ house. That’s kinda where I think President Obama is today. He seriously needs to re-think his position on almost every major issue. Perhaps its time to do the opposite of what Rahm thinks…. No new stimulus package, re-new the Bush tax cuts, leave a few more combat soldiers in Iraq, throw a bone to Israel, leave Arizona alone, etc., etc. …

Pickings on July 25th this year contained a small Pickerhead rant about the president’s attitudes towards Great Britain that some readers properly criticized. Today we have a long piece from Forbes by Dinesh D’Souza that provides an excellent explanation of the sources for the president’s ignorance.

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government’s control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama’s approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President’s actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: “Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling.” Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling–but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama’s backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro–not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

More strange behavior: Obama’s June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans “consume more than 20% of the world’s oil but have less than 2% of the world’s resources.” Obama railed on about “America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.” What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world’s resources?

The oddities go on and on. …

…It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

… Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world’s energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America’s carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.
…

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father’s time machine.

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George Will highlights two Republican candidates from South Carolina who have campaigned on ideas.

The libretto of this operatic election season, understandably promoted by Democrats and unsurprisingly sung by many in the media, is that Republicans have sown the seeds of November disappointments by nominating candidates other than those the party’s supposedly wiser establishment prefers. This theory is inconvenienced by two facts: South Carolina’s Nikki Haley and Tim Scott.

“I am a policy girl,” Haley, 38, says demurely. But she is a savvy politician who in 2004 won a state legislature seat by defeating the longest-serving incumbent. Although the state’s Republican establishment opposed her nomination for governor, she won because for two years she has been traveling around the state asking this question: Does anyone think it odd that in 2007 only 8 percent of the decisions by the state House, and only 1 percent of the state Senate’s decisions, were made by recorded votes?

The political class and its parasitic lobbyists preferred government conducted in private. Haley, whose early campaign strategy was exuberantly indiscriminate (“go anywhere and talk to anybody”) won the gubernatorial nomination by defeating the state’s lieutenant governor, its attorney general and a congressman. …

And then we head to the other end of the Republican spectrum, where the Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski’s desperate attempts to hold on to the Senate seat given to her by her father.

…Republican voters last month rejected the incumbent daughter just as they rejected the incumbent father. Princess Lisa lost the primary to Tea Party-backed Fairbanks lawyer Joe Miller — who also boasted the endorsement of Palin.

Republicans are poised to make historic gains against a power-drunk Democratic Party spending America into bankruptcy, but Sen. Murkowski apparently doesn’t care a whit about party or country. To stoke her own ego, she is set to launch a divisive write-in campaign against her own party’s nominee.

…As the Tea Party grass-roots revolt rages, the people have made it clear the Murkowskis represent the past. Defeating her even in her own party’s primary was an extraordinary signal of no confidence for an incumbent senator.

Palin supported the father some years ago in the name of party unity. Now Lisa Murkowski, this princess of a party dynasty, refuses to do the same — just because her name isn’t the one in lights. If there’s any Achilles’ heel that can be exploited against such RINOs, it’s obviously their oversized egos.

In Forbes, Joel Kotkin looks at how sections of the country with a lot of government and stimulus-financed funds are improving, at the expense of the rest of the taxpayers and the national debt. What will happen after the elections is hard to predict: whether there will be enough politicians with faith in market forces to allow productive markets to flourish, to everyone’s benefit.

…It is not surprising then that the capital district enjoys the highest job growth since December 2009 of any region. Indeed, the Great Recession barely even hit the imperial center. Given its current trajectory, it’s likely to remain the primary boom town along the east coast.

There are other less obvious regional winners from Obamanomics. Wall Street, despite its recent wailing, has fattened itself on the Fed’s cheap money. It may benefit further from highly complex new financial regulations that will drive smaller, regional competitors either out of business or into mergers with the megabanks.

Manhattan – a liberal bastion dependent on arguably the greediest, most venal purveyors of capitalism – enjoyed a revived high end consumer economy of high fashion, fancy restaurants and art galleries. Silicon Valley’s financial community also is seeing a surfeit of grants and subsidies for the latest venture schemes, keeping Palo Alto and its environs relatively prosperous. Perhaps this is the positive “change” that Time recently credited in its paen to the stimulus.

Other regional winners from the Obama economy generally can be found in state capitals and University towns, particularly those with the Ivy or elite college pedigrees that resonate with this most academic Administration. One illustration can be seen in the relatively strong recovery of Massachusetts – home to many prestigious Universities and hospitals – which has seen jobs grow by 2.2 percent since the Obama ascension. …

David Goldman sees the bubbles bursting in the public sector and the financial sector after the November elections.

…A great deal of Obama’s $800 billion stimulus went to cover state and local budget gaps. It was political life-support for the hard core of the Democratic party political base, the public employee unions whose generous pension deals have turned into an estimated $3 trillion underfunding gap. As bond yields remain depressed and equity returns remain non-existent that gap will grow.

And we are about to get a Republican Congress populated by candidates who ran on a promise of no more bailouts. In a deep and prolonged recession, the voters simply won’t approve new taxes (or new deficits) to bail out public employees who have it better than most employees in the private sector. The drumbeat against government employees sounds nightly on Fox News.

…The cure for the crisis is to break the public employee unions. It’s as simple as that. Layoffs, salary and pension givebacks, hiring of non-union employees, and so forth will enable cities and states to adjust to the misery of their circumstances.  …

In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner blogs that media liberals are starting to see the writing on the wall, and in their newspapers.

…The Post also ran another headline yesterday on its front page – “Republicans making gains ahead of midterm elections” – which would undoubtedly have sent a shudder through the White House. It carried a new poll commissioned jointly with ABC News, which showed public faith in Barack Obama’s leadership has fallen to an all-time low, with just 46 percent approval. The Washington Post-ABC News survey revealed high levels of public unease with President Obama’s handling of the economy, with 57 percent of Americans disapproving, and 58 percent critical of his handling of the deficit.

For most of the year, America’s political and media elites, including the Obama team itself, have touted the notion of an economic recovery (which never materialised), significantly underestimated the rise of the Tea Party movement, and questioned the notion that conservatism was sweeping America. It is only now hitting home just how close Washington is to experiencing a political revolution in November that will fundamentally change the political landscape on Capitol Hill, with huge implications for the Obama presidency. What was once a perspective confined largely to Fox News, online conservative news sites, or talk radio is now gaining ground in the liberal US print media as well – historic change is coming to America, though not quite the version promised by Barack Obama.

Daniel Foster posts on the Florida polls, in the Corner.

From Sunshine State News:

Republican Marco Rubio, garnering surprising strength among independent voters, holds a double-digit lead over his two chief rivals in Florida’s U.S. Senate race, a new Sunshine State News Poll reports. The survey of likely voters shows Rubio with 43 percent, independent Charlie Crist with 29 percent, Democrat Kendrick Meek with 23 percent and the remaining 5 percent undecided. …

The Schumpeter Blog in the Economist discusses the diminishing value of American higher education, thanks to government policies, and whether needed reforms will occur.

…College fees have for decades risen faster than Americans’ ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison.

As costs soar, diligence is tumbling. In 1961 full-time students in four-year colleges spent 24 hours a week studying; that has fallen to 14, estimates the AEI. …

…The most plausible explanation is that professors are not particularly interested in students’ welfare. Promotion and tenure depend on published research, not good teaching. Professors strike an implicit bargain with their students: we will give you light workloads and inflated grades so long as you leave us alone to do our research. Mr Hacker and Ms Dreifus point out that senior professors in Ivy League universities now get sabbaticals every third year rather than every seventh. This year 20 of Harvard’s 48 history professors will be on leave. …

…The Goldwater Institute points to a third poison to add to rising prices and declining productivity: administrative bloat. Between 1993 and 2007 spending on university bureaucrats at America’s 198 leading universities rose much faster than spending on teaching faculty. Administration costs at elite private universities rose even faster than at public ones. For example, Harvard increased its administrative spending per student by 300%. In some universities, such as Arizona State University, almost half the full-time employees are administrators. Nearly all university presidents conduct themselves like corporate titans, with salaries, perks and entourages to match. …

We get interesting anecdotal evidence from a recent graduate at The Frisky.com. Jessica Wakeman writes about her high-priced, impractical education.

I have a lot of regrets about my college education.

I regret that tuition was $40,000 a year, so that my classmates were mostly rich, white kids. I regret that I am paying back thousands in student loans. I regret that my journalism program forced me to take an introductory class on reporting, even though I’d already written articles for my hometown newspaper for two years. … I regret that I wasted time, money, and precious sanity on a required math class that gave me the anxiety attacks of your worst nightmares.

And most of all, I regret that I took as many gender and sexuality studies courses as I did.

Gender and sexuality studies classes ostensibly teach you to analyze the world with a critical lens, focusing on how one’s gender or sexuality impacts their life. Some classes deal with theoretical issues; others focus on literature, history or religion. Lots of gender and sexuality studies students go on to work in law, labor organizing, or social work. …my transcript from that time includes gems like the History of Prostitution, an introduction to grassroots organizing, and a class about pop culture …

…But I could have benefited from more politics, history and literature classes—to learn more about the world in general, rather than one tiny little sliver of the world. There’s a difference between what I thought was “cool” to learn about at the time and what has actually proved useful in life. … I probably could have learned a lot about sex work and labor abuse by reading magazine and newspaper articles on the subjects. But learning more about colonialism? Globalization? The World Wars? Important books? Religion? Supreme Court decisions? That knowledge would have provided such a better foundation for me as a writer than what I think I received from gender studies classes.

…Today I just find myself playing catch-up, reading the great books and researching great moments in history that I should have learned in school.

In Business Insider.com, Vincent Fernando spots an unbelievable story. Read his blog to find out the reason he gives for China’s housing bubble.

Property stocks in China were weak today due to media reports that the Beijing and Shanghai authorities were investigating the high vacancy rate for Chinese property. Markets are worried they’ll be shocked by what they discover and clamp down on speculation even harder than they have.

How large might the vacancy problem be? Here’s a taste:

Finance Asia:

Recent statistics show that there are about 64 million apartments and houses that have remained empty during the past six months, according to Chinese media reports. On the assumption that each flat serves as a home to a typical Chinese family of three (parents and one child), the vacant properties could accommodate 200 million people, which account for more than 15% of the country’s 1.3 billion population. But instead, they remain empty. This is in part because many Chinese believe that a home is not a real home unless you own the flat. …

J.E. Dyer, in Hot Air, describes what how little the new “green” lightbulbs offset carbon emissions. You’ll enjoy his summation of the facts, which is the only funny thing about this green debacle.

Hot Air’s headlines linked a Washington Post piece today on the closing of the last US manufacturing plant for the humble incandescent light bulb.  The article’s focus is on the “irony” of US engineers having come up with the compact-fluorescent lightbulb (CFL), as well as the way to manufacture it efficiently, but the actual manufacturing jobs – which are labor-intensive – having migrated overseas.

Of course, only if you’re a Washington Post writer does it seem ironic to you that manufacturers move their plants to where taxes are lower and all employer costs cheaper.  But the article has other unintended ironies – or, at least, fatuous and utterly unexamined statements.  The most important one occurs in paragraph 6, near the beginning, and it comes in for critical scrutiny not at all.  In fact, it’s expressed in vague, impressionistic terms that ought to get a journalist horsewhipped by a serious editor.  Here’s what WaPo tells us about the US decision to force the phase-out of the incandescent bulb…