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In Contentions, J.E. Dyer describes how America is quietly abdicating naval power.

…This is how maritime dominance is lost: incrementally and off the public’s radar. The U.S. Navy, as an oceangoing sea-control force, has shrunk from 568 ships and submarines in 1987 to 285 today. Our NATO allies’ navies have shrunk significantly as well, some of them by greater percentages. Among our key allies, only Japan and Australia are investing in larger and more diverse naval forces. The U.S. military, under Defense Secretary Gates, is looking at reducing further the inventory of warships — aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines — that perform sea-control missions and maintain maritime dominance. Equally troubling, DoD proposes to eliminate entirely the two major U.S. commands most closely linked with NATO and maritime power in the Atlantic: Joint Forces Command and the U.S. Second Fleet. Events, on the other hand, continue to warn us against this irresponsible course. We can expect more of them.

J.E. Dyer also discusses what is happening in Israeli foreign relations in the wake of Obama’s disastrous foreign policy.

…Israel signed a framework agreement for defense cooperation with Russia on September 6 — the first ever between these two nations — and has been at work this year resurrecting its defense-cooperation agreement with China. …

…“Defense cooperation” portends more than military sales; it can mean conferences, intelligence and personnel exchanges, joint training, and shared weapons development. It’s a field of agreement with inherent implications for regional relations and security. And Israel’s defense-cooperation outreach this year is hardly random. Binyamin Netanyahu typically handles national security like a statesman in the Western classical mold, and it appears he is doing so here. Warming up ties with Russia and China is a way to gain leverage with the major outside powers that are putting down stakes in the Middle East as Obama’s America loses energy and presence. …

…The impetus for Israel to do this now comes from the persistent inertia of the Obama administration. …There is no rational basis for assuming Obama will take effective action against Iran or revise his approach to Syria. Exclusive alignment with the policy trend of Obama’s America promises nothing but disaster for Israel. In the absence of American strength — across the whole Middle Eastern region — Israel’s security situation will change. Although it means inviting Russia further into the Middle East, Netanyahu must work with reality in 2010: he must look for support — for a balancing agent with the region’s radical regimes — where he can find it.

David Warren writes that big government has been effective at stealing from its citizens, and bankrupting the nation. Perhaps it is time to remove both of these powers from politicians’ control.

…The background problem is simplicity itself. The Nanny State has blown the bank. She, or it, has done so everywhere. Even after appropriating half of every person’s national income with taxes both direct and indirect, and after offloading the costs of cumbersome do-good schemes onto businesses through convoluted regulations, Nanny is reduced to printing money.

…The cultivation and manipulation of envy is at the heart of all political schemes for income redistribution, and parties of the Left have been building their client base upon it. …

…The closest thing I can see to hope is currently invested in the Tea Party movement of the U.S. Notwithstanding the slanders heaped upon it, this movement is good-willed, riot-free, indeed situationally non-urban, and under the leadership of basically sane people. Of course, there is no guarantee that any movement devoted to genuine political change can remain so, under the inevitable provocations.

…That measure is, quite frankly, the complete dismantlement of the Nanny State, and the restoration of the status quo ante — governments focused on the provision of national defence, and domestically on the machinery of law and order. Full stop. …

David Harsanyi is lobbying for a sarcasm tax credit.

…Tax cuts for small businesses are always morally acceptable. Small businesses are innocuous coffee shops. Big business is chemical spills. They don’t deserve anything. Small business tax cuts help florists while “capital gains” cuts help hedge fund managers who should drawn and quartered, not rewarded.

During Labor Day weekend, I caught a number of local Democratic candidates calling themselves tax cutters in ads. Yet, nearly all of the tax cuts Americans have seen the past year and a half advance some liberal moral or social good. The overriding goal of the stimuli and tax breaks — from the things we build to the jobs we save to the tax credits we get — is to pick economic winners, steer us in the right direction and wheedle citizens to be good boys and girls.

To offer comprehensive, amoral cuts would be to admit ideological defeat. To allow them to work would mean a long-term disaster for Obama and the type of Democrats who now inhabit Congress.

This president would never surrender to such indignity.

Thomas Sowell gives a few historic examples how government intervention hurts the economy. Here he explains the Great Depression.

…There are two conflicting assumptions about what happened during the Great Depression. The most popular assumption, especially among politicians, is that the market failed and the government had to intervene to save the economy.

Another assumption is that the market went down and was on its way back up when federal intervention sent it down again and led to massive unemployment. …

…if you look at the facts, they go like this: Unemployment never hit double digits in any of the 12 months following the big stock market crash of 1929 that is often blamed for the massive unemployment of the 1930s. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the October 1929 crash, and then began drifting downward.

Unemployment was down to 6.3 percent by June 1930, when the first big federal intervention occurred. Within six months, the downward trend in unemployment reversed and hit double digits for the first time in December 1930.

What were politicians to do? Say “We messed up”? Or keep trying one huge intervention after another? The record shows what they did: President Hoover’s interventions were followed by President Roosevelt’s bigger interventions— and unemployment remained in double digits in every month for the entire remainder of the decade. …

Tunku Varadarajan wades through presidential pop culture.

…None of this would be worth a moment’s conversation had Obama not carried so much political support by dint of his sex appeal, which was an amalgam of his youth, his seeming dynamism, his idealism (always carefully curated, but always palpable), and his cinematic visual imagery… The great downside of all that came when he had to fill the seductive, pulse-quickening profile with presidential substance. The real world has quarried away at him in the form of Iran, BP, North Korea, Israel, Afghanistan, the economy, the Tea Party, and the like. The result has not been “hot.” It’s been room temperature.

…The promise of “otherness” and change that had made Obama so sexy to so many stands shorn of its magic. He has tried to do too much, and as a result has done too little well: And failure is not sexy. He has given speech after speech to a restless, increasingly irritated nation, like a man trying to “talk” about the relationship when a girl wants to be ravaged; he has been a preachy, professorial windbag—in a word, charmless. This hasn’t merely diminished his sex appeal; it has killed it stone dead. Obama now looks more like tank-commander Dukakis than the George Clooney of our national narrative…

…Which leaves America without a single politician of stature with any sex appeal at all. It’s enough to make one weep.

Jennifer Rubin looks at the different party messages.

…Less than eight weeks before the election, the Republicans, as Bill Kristol points out, have a nice, sharp message: stop spending so much and stop raising taxes. You might not agree with it, but you know what they stand for. This was, after all, the media and the Obami’s complaint — “no ideas” from Republicans.

What’s Obama got? Cut some taxes, but raise others. We’re on the road to recovery, but really not. The deficit is strangling us but here’s another $50B for some government-bank idea to build the roads which I had told you the $800B stimulus plan would pay for. It’s not only not working, it’s a jumble — and it’s magnifying the problem: businesses are racked with uncertainty. …

Jennifer Rubin writes, if you think Rahm Emmanuel is bad, consider his likely replacement.

Those who keep advising Obama to fire people miss a key point: the replacements could be worse than the current crew. No, it really is possible. Mayor Daley of Chicago won’t run for another term, and Washington is abuzz with speculation that Rahm Emanuel will leave (flee?) the administration to run for the job. Ben Smith reports: “Emanuel has told Chicago associates, a source tells me, who he believes will likely succeed him: senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.”

Obama will be trading one Chicago pol (who at least understood how to elect Democrats from places that weren’t deep Blue) for a liberal Chicago pol whose instincts seem to mirror David Axelrod’s: when in doubt, go left. This was the gal who thought Obama’s defense of the Ground Zero mosque was a swell idea. She also remains a potential witness in the Blago retrial. She also led the vendetta against Fox News.  And of course, 9/11 truther Van Jones was her hire.

In short, if the Obami are looking for a far-left chief of staff with bad political instincts and a Chicago-machine outlook, they couldn’t do “better” than Valerie Jarrett.

Michael Barone comments on the November elections.

…Republicans need to gain 39 seats for a House majority. The professional analysts see it happening: Larry Sabato puts the number at 47, Stuart Rothenberg at 37 to 42, Charlie Cook at 40. Cook notes that Democratic incumbents are trailing Republican challengers in polls in 32 districts.

These are cautious prognosticators who evaluate candidates for every seat. No wonder Politico’s Mike Allen wrote yesterday that “the sky is falling” for the Democrats. …

…I think what we’re seeing is a rejection of the Obama Democrats’ big-government policies. The president and his party thought that in times of economic distress most voters would be supportive of or at least amenable to a vast expansion of the size and scope of government. …

John Stossel looks at how the Institute for Justice helps small businesses cut through unnecessary regulations.

Every day, federal, state and local governments stifle small businesses to privilege well-connected incumbent companies. It’s a system of protectionism for influential insiders who don’t want competition. Every locality has its share of business moguls who are cozy with politicians. Together, they use the power of government to keep competition down and prices high.

The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, works to free entrepreneurs from such opportunity-killing regulations. Here are four cases from IJ’s files.

Case No. 1. The monks at St. Joseph Abbey had to take the state of Louisiana to federal court to defend their right to make money selling handmade caskets. That’s right: empty wooden boxes. But as soon as the monks started selling them, they were shocked to receive a cease-and-desist order from something called the Louisiana State Board of Funeral Directors. The funeral directors had managed to get their state to pass a law decreeing that only “licensed funeral directors” may sell “funeral merchandise” like caskets. To sell caskets legally, the monks would have to obtain a funeral director’s license. That required a year-long apprenticeship, passing a funeral industry test and converting their monastery into a “funeral establishment” by installing embalming equipment, among other things.

The state board and the Louisiana Funeral Directors Association — the profession’s lobbyist — say the law is designed to protect consumers. But that’s what established businesses always say about absurd regulations they demand. An unusually candid funeral director told The Wall Street Journal, “They’re cutting into our profit.” Well, yes, free competition does do that. That’s the point. …

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Claudia Rosett comments on the Obami’s attempt to curry favor with the U.N.. Particularly at a time when our economy is struggling, such an article raises the question of why we fund an organization that is so corrupt, biased, and worthless in any honorable endeavors.

…Packaged as a 29-page report aiming to create “a more perfect union” in “a more perfect world,” this U.S. self-critique was sent by the State Department on Aug. 20 to the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, in preparation for a formal review on Nov. 5 by the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. A glaring feature of this report is its disparaging mention of Arizona’s new immigration law. This is the same law that Attorney General Eric Holder condemned in May without reading, and which the Obama administration is challenging in court. State is presenting this situation for review by the U.N., implying that Arizona is violating human rights with a law that has “generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world.”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer registered her protest in an Aug. 27 letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking that the section on Arizona’s immigration law be removed from the report. Calling it “downright offensive” that Arizona law be offered up by the federal government for a “human rights” review by such U.N. members as Libya and Cuba, Brewer wrote: “The idea of our own American government submitting the duly enacted laws of a State of the United States to ‘review’ by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional.”

…After an opening bit of lip service to “individual freedoms,” the report, along with lambasting Arizona’s immigration law, goes on to laud ObamaCare as making “great strides” for human rights–never mind that a majority of Americans did not want this regulatory Godzilla of a partisan health care bill. There is a laundry list of new affirmative action quotas, targeted federal grants, and pursuit of “freedom from want” via “social benefits” in which redistribution of wealth is required by law. And there are such items as a reprise of the case cited by Obama in his 2009 Cairo speech, in which the U.S. Justice Department defended the right of a Muslim girl to wear a head covering, or hijab. (This last is presumably to curry favor with Islamic countries, despite the reality that human rights violations in these places tend to involve the punishment of women who prefer not to wear the veil, or, in the case of Saudi Arabia, the full-body abaya). …

Michael Barone discusses another government-financed bubble that may be about to burst.

…Government-subsidized loans have injected money into higher education, as they did into housing, causing prices to balloon. But at some point people figure out they’re not getting their money’s worth, and the bubble bursts.

… The National Center for Education Statistics found that most college graduates are below proficiency in verbal and quantitative literacy. University of California scholars Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks report that students these days study an average of 14 hours a week, down from 24 hours in 1961.

…Transparency could also undermine the numerous dropout factories, public and private, described and listed by the liberal Washington Monthly. More than 90 percent of students there never graduate, but most end up with student loan debt.

…People are beginning to note that administrative bloat, so common in government, seems especially egregious in colleges and universities. Somehow previous generations got by and even prospered without these legions of counselors, liaison officers and facilitators. …

In the Financial Times, Clive Crook has interesting center-left commentary on the coming elections.

…Two other points deserve more attention than they have received. First, most commentators see the midterms as a referendum on Mr Obama. This is wrong. The elections are a referendum on the party in power — that is, on the president’s partnership with Democrats in Congress led by Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate. …

…Mr Obama should have kept his distance from his allies on Capitol Hill. It would have been better for him, and better for them. Centrist voters embraced Mr Obama in 2008 because they thought he would temper a polarised and dysfunctional Congress. He let them down. The reflexive opposition of Republicans is much to blame, but Mr Obama did not try very hard. Pragmatic he may be, but unlike the instinctively centrist Bill Clinton, he leans left. If Ms Pelosi and Mr Reid could deliver irreproachably liberal policies — on healthcare, energy, the stimulus, whatever — that was fine with him. As it turned out, they often had to compromise, but that was because of a sliver of conservative Democrats, not Mr Obama. …

…Strangely, it is not just the centre that is disappointed. Another potentially decisive factor in November is sagging enthusiasm in the Democratic base. You need not look far for the reason. For nearly two years, media progressives have whined about the administration and its works. The White House showed its frustration at this recently when spokesman Robert Gibbs attacked the “professional left”. He was rebuked by progressives, but he was correct. Turn-out in the midterms will be crucial, yet the left has talked itself into apathy. …

Nile Gardiner blogs about the polling numbers, and looks not only at wins, but the issues important to the electorate.

…Another poll by Gallup this week shows Republicans leading the Democrats in Congress on the handling of nine key election issues, including terrorism (a 24 point lead), immigration (15 points), federal spending (15 points), and the economy (11 points). In only one area do the Democrats hold a significant advantage – the environment, which is low down the list of voter priorities. On key economic issues, likely to dominate in November, the Republicans have a seemingly unassailable advantage – the four most important voter issues according to Gallup are the economy, jobs, corruption in government and federal spending.

Gallup’s findings largely mirror another major poll, released by Rasmussen in late August, which found that voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on all ten key issues it regularly surveys. This includes an eight point lead on the economy and national security/ War on Terror, a nine point lead on immigration, and a striking 16-point lead on the issue of taxes. As they do in the Gallup poll, the Republicans have an overwhelming advantage on economic issues, which are likely to prove a major Achilles heel for the Democrats in November.

… According to Rasmussen, just 29 percent of likely voters now believe the country is heading in the right direction, a damning indictment of President Obama’s leadership of the country. …

…The Obama presidency is facing meltdown, and according to the polls is likely to be greatly weakened from November onwards, throwing a major spanner in the works of the ambitious Obama agenda to remake America. A conservative revolution is heading its way to Washington on a wave of anti-government sentiment, and looks unstoppable. Like Jimmy Carter before him, President Obama has succeeded in revitalising conservatism in the United States, and reawakening a sleeping giant. When Barack Obama spoke in his election campaign of bringing “change” to America, I doubt this is quite what he had in mind.

In Politico, Jennifer Haberkorn reports on how Dems are handling Obamacare in their campaigning.

A handful of House Democrats are making health care reform an election year issue — by running against it.

At least five of the 34 House Democrats who voted against their party’s health care reform bill are highlighting their “no” votes in ads back home. By contrast, party officials in Washington can’t identify a single House member who’s running an ad boasting of a “yes” vote — despite the fact that 219 House Democrats voted in favor of final passage in March. …

…Most of the Democrats running ads highlighting their opposition to the law are in conservative-leaning districts and considered the most endangered. They’re using their vote against the overhaul as proof of their willingness to buck party leadership and their commitment to watching the nation’s debt. …

George Will discusses how global warmists have fallen out of favor.

…Environmentalism began as Bambi doing battle with Godzillas, such as the Army Corps of Engineers. Then, says Mead, environmentalism became Godzilla, an advocate of “a big and simple fix for all that ails us: a global carbon cap. One big problem, one big fix.” Mead continues:

“Never mind that the leading green political strategy … is and always has been so cluelessly unrealistic as to be clinically insane. The experts decree and we rubes are not to think but to honor and obey.”

The essence of progressivism, of which environmentalism has become an appendage, is the faith that all will be well once we have concentrated enough power in Washington and have concentrated enough Washington power in the executive branch and have concentrated enough “experts” in that branch. Hence the Environmental Protection Agency proposes to do what the elected representatives of the rubes refuse to do in limiting greenhouse gases. …

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David Warren looks at the sham Middle East peace process.

…Now consider Mahmoud Abbas. He is the head of the Palestinian Authority, successor to the leadership of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Does my gentle reader believe he wants Israeli soldiers to leave the West Bank? Those who say “yes” have been seriously misinformed. Think, for a moment, and you will understand why Abbas would want the Israeli soldiers out, even less than Netanyahu would want to withdraw them, or to withdraw the Jewish settlements they defend.

This is because, if they do withdraw, Hamas will come to power, and slaughter the colleagues of Mahmoud Abbas — plus the man himself, should he not get out in time.

We can know this for fact. We actually saw what happened when the Israeli soldiers withdrew from Gaza, after uprooting all 21 Jewish settlements there. It took Hamas less than two years to physically eliminate their Fatah rivals, and they would have done it faster had the Israelis not launched the occasional airstrike against a significant Hamas target (in response to gratuitous rocket attacks into Israeli territory). But in the end, Fatah’s Gaza generals and administrators bloodily “disappeared,” usually with their families.

…While Abbas was smiling in his grandfatherly way in Washington this week, his ambassador in Tehran, Salah Zawawi, was declaring that, “the relentless struggle (jihad) against the Zionist occupier will continue until the liberation of Holy Quds.” That would be Jerusalem in your English-language atlas.

So much for the “moderates.” …

Peter Wehner shares his thoughts on the political considerations affecting Obama’s Afghanistan policy, that Charles Krauthammer discussed in an article in yesterday’s Pickings.

…And it’s not the first time such a thing has been said about Obama. Here is a paragraph from a June 23 Washington Post article on the controversy then surrounding General Stanley McChrystal:

…In exchange for approving McChrystal’s request for more troops and treasure, Obama imposed, and the military accepted, two deadlines sought by his political aides. In December, one year after the strategy was announced, the situation would be reviewed and necessary adjustments made. In July 2011, the troops would begin to come home. [emphasis added]

These are damning admissions — war policies not only being influenced by partisan considerations but in important respects being driven by them.

…Yet in Tuesday’s prime-time address to the nation, Obama, rather than walk back from his arbitrary withdrawal date, went out of his way to re-emphasize it. “Make no mistake,” the president said, “this transition will begin because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.”

It turns out that the locution “our interests” refers not to America’s national interests but to Obama’s political self-interest instead. …

Peter Wehner also blogs about a liberal who has lost perspective, to put it politely.

I’ve admitted that it’s become something of a hobby of mine to point out how the left is becoming increasingly unhinged and alienated from America and turning on the American people with a vengeance (see here and here). We can add the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson to the list. According to Robinson,

In the punditry business, it’s considered bad form to question the essential wisdom of the American people. But at this point, it’s impossible to ignore the obvious: The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.

…We have gone from an estimable people to a bunch of spoiled brats — all because the citizenry is rising up against a president who they believe (with considerable evidence on their side) is doing harm to their country. …

In the WSJ, Allysia Finley tells us more about the most expensive school ever built. The next question we’d like answered is: How much do all the yahoo administrators in the L.A. school district get paid?

At $578 million—or about $140,000 per student—the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city’s Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores. …

…The district’s building spree has sparked outrage from charter schools, not least because they are getting only a tiny piece of the bond pie. California Charter School Association President Jed Wallace says a charter school can be built at a seventh of the cost of the Kennedy complex and a quarter of most L.A. schools. For example, the nonprofit Green Dot built seven charters in the area—to serve about 4,300 mainly low-income students—for less than $85 million in total. These schools also have a collective graduation rate that’s nearly twice as high as that of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which Education Week magazine pegs at 40%.

Mr. Rubin says it’s unfair to compare charters with traditional public schools because charters aren’t saddled with onerous government regulations regarding labor and environmental standards. What he doesn’t say is that charter schools don’t have taxpayers as a backstop. Traditional public schools “have no accountability or restraints,” Mr. Wallace bristles. “They don’t have to make the tough choices when costs run over.” …

David Harsanyi engages in a little bit of Christina Romer-bashing.

Admitting you’re a fan of economics is another way of saying you live a deeply tragic life.

…But the most crucial lesson I’ve gleaned from smart men and women who practice the dismal science is this: Those who claim to grasp the vagaries of the economy enough to predict the future with any amount of certitude are charlatans.

Which neatly segues into a discussion about the reckless tenure of technocrat Christina Romer, former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and one of the chief architects of the stimulus plan. …

In Euro Pacific Capital, Michael Pento gives a brief explanation of the importance of goods producing jobs in an economy.

The BLS reported today that private sector employment increased by 67,000, while overall employment fell by 54,000. The unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6% from 9.5%. Far be it from me to highlight the negative side of this report but it is vitally important to know that manufacturing payrolls decreased by 27,000 and the Goods Producing sector of the economy produced ZERO jobs in August. …

…In fact, we lost over 200k goods producing jobs just in the last 12 months. Manufacturing, mining, construction and agricultural jobs create goods that can be traded and stored and provide the basis for developing real wealth. That is why they are so important and without them a country is doomed to chronically increase its trade and current account deficits. That leads to a constant erosion in the value of the currency and causes an inexorable selling of domestic assets into foreign ownership. …

Also in Euro Pacific Capital, Mark Hanna gives a snapshot of some of the latest economic numbers and what they mean.

U.S. stocks rallied on employment data that degraded month over month, but was not as bad as had been anticipated in some quarters… It certainly was an interesting week where a few reports the market viewed as positive, overshadowed many more that were showing weakening. …
On the economic front were 2 very closely watched economic reports – the monthly unemployment data, and ISM Services (which represents 80%+ of the economy).  Both were weaker than the previous month, but with whisper numbers of negative private job creation any positive job growth was seen as a positive.  So while the trend is down, it was “better than expectation” which normally is enough to get the market rallying.  The headline number is not worth mentioning as it is affected by census workers, but the private jobs figure was +67,000 versus an expectation of +40,000.  In an economy with over 110M workers, one would not think a difference of 27,000 jobs would bring such cheer to the market, but this was the case.  Of course the U.S. economy requires in excess of 125,000 jobs each month simply to keep up with population growth, so that bar was not beat – and the 67,000 is significantly lower than the 107,000 jobs created in July.  …  The unemployment rate increased from 9.5% to 9.6% as over half a million people re-entered the workforce; hence even as there was an increase in jobs the number of people entering the workforce was a much larger figure, leading to a higher unemployment rate. …

In the Corner, Veronique de Rugy looks at Obama’s alternative to Bush tax cuts.

Now, I guess to try to appear more business-friendly, the administration is weighing “hundred of billions in small business tax cuts,” according to the Washington Post:

The White House is seriously weighing a package of business tax breaks — potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars — to spur hiring and combat Republican charges that Democratic tax policies hurt small businesses.

…And if you remember, in an interview, William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, said, “Our member surveys for plans to add inventory and plans to hire are all coming in at 35 year lows. They have no reason to hire anybody because they don’t have anything to do. That’s why the tax credit is a silly idea.”

If the administration were so eager to help businesses, large or small,  it would end the constant public-policy uncertainties that businesses are facing: The health-care overhaul, which will bring new but still unknown obligations to insure employees, and legislation aimed at tackling climate change, which could raise businesses’ energy costs, add to the uncertainty about the economy. The new financial regulation, which will take years to put in place, adds its share of uncertainty, as does the potential expiration of the tax cuts. Meanwhile, as government spending increases, so do the chances of more taxes in the future. …

Ed Morrissey laughs at the Obami for yet another gaffe.

Today, the Washington Post notices that the White House doesn’t bother to do much research.  Of course, had Jamie Stiehm been an avid reader of our Obamateurisms of the Day feature at Hot Air, the Post may have noticed this over a year ago:

…“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.

Except it’s not a King quote. …

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.

For the record, King never claimed the phrase as his own.  He quoted Parker, one of his inspirations, in using this phrase, a point never noticed by Barack Obama during his campaign.  He repeated the phrase often enough that it caught the attention of Reverend Matt Tittle, who attempted to inform the campaign in April 2008 that Obama was misattributing the quote.  The campaign never replied to Tittle, but for a while Obama dropped the reference, and Tittle thought the message had been received. …

In Popular Science, Rebecca Boyle writes about an interesting prospect for cheap, efficient, green energy.

One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium and 3.5 million tons of coal, according to the former director of CERN. via Telegraph

An abundant metal with vast energy potential could quickly wean the world off oil, if only Western political leaders would muster the will to do it, a UK newspaper says today. The Telegraph makes the case for thorium reactors as the key to a fossil-fuel-free world within five years, and puts the ball firmly in President Barack Obama’s court. …

…The Telegraph says this $1.8 billion (£1.2 billion) project could lead to a network of tiny underground nuclear reactors, producing about 600 MW each. Their wee size would negate the enormous security apparatus required of full-size nuclear power plants. …

…But nuclear plants need fuel, which means building controversial uranium mines. Thorium, on the other hand, is so abundant that it’s almost an annoyance. It’s considered a waste product when mining for rare-earth metals.

Thorium also solves the non-proliferation problem. Nuclear non-proliferation treaties (NPT) prohibit processes that can yield atomic bomb ingredients, making it difficult to refine highly radioactive isotopes. But thorium-based accelerator-driven plants only produce a small amount of plutonium, which could allow the U.S. and other nations to skirt NPT. …

In the Michigan View, Henry Payne reports a story of Green hypocrisy and a little bit of poetic justice.

Add Jesse Jackson’s ride to prominent vehicles being stripped in Detroit.

Following the embarrassing news that Mayor Dave Bing’s GMC Yukon was hijacked by criminals this week, Detroit’s Channel 7 reports that the Reverend’s Caddy Escalade SUV was stolen and stripped of its wheels while he was in town last weekend with the UAW’s militant President Bob King leading the “Jobs, Justice, and Peace” march promoting government-funded green jobs.

Read that again: Jackson’s Caddy SUV was stripped while he was in town promoting green jobs.

Add Jesse to the Al Gore-Tom Friedman-Barack Obama School of Environmental Hypocrisy. While preaching to Americans that they need to cram their families into hybrid Priuses to go shopping for compact fluorescent light bulbs to save the planet, they themselves continue to live large. …

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In the Jerusalem Post, Daniel Gordis has a stellar article on what lies behind the Ground Zero mosque controversy.

…For Israelis do have something to teach Americans… It goes something like this: It’s fine to say that “America is not at war with Islam,” to point out that most Muslims are not terrorists and that many American Muslims are moderates. That’s true, as far as it goes.

But it only goes so far. Because America is at war and its enemies are Muslims. Politically correct hairsplitting runs the risk of Americans blinding themselves to that simple but critical fact. It makes no difference what percentage of the world’s Muslims wants to destroy America. There are enough of them that US air travel is now abominably unpleasant and, more importantly, enough of them that more strikes on America appear inevitable. …

…When my parents were teenagers, they watched as evil took hold of Europe. But then they saw America turn itself into an unprecedented, enormous military machine. For America’s leaders understood that if the Nazis won, the world as we knew it would be over…

But when my children were teenagers, a different evil took root across their eastern horizon. This time, though, the world has feigned impotence. Iran is at the nuclear threshold. Iraq was at best a “non-failure.” The battle against the Taliban and al-Qaida may take years, or decades, and may require many lives sacrificed if we are to win. But America has grown war-weary. Obama is already planning to bring the troops home; the word “terrorist” is increasingly off-limits in the US because it is considered “politically loaded.”…

…Its tendency to gentility is part of what has made America great. But an unwillingness to call an “enemy” an enemy could lead to America’s demise. For Islam’s radical leaders tell us clearly what they seek: a world united under Islam, with America’s sacred freedoms eradicated as a new “morality” replaces them. What is much less clear is whether Americans are willing to fight – to die and to kill – to protect those freedoms. …

In Der Spiegel, Thomas Straubhaar writes about traditional American values, and whether we will return to the principles that made America great.

…A firm belief in the individual’s ability, ideas, courage, will and a reliance on one’s own resources brought the US to the top. The American dream promised everyone the chance of upward mobility — literally from rags to riches, from minimum wage to millionaire. The individual’s pursuit of happiness was seen as the crucial foundation for the well-being of society, rather than the benevolent state which cares for its subjects — and certainly not the welfare state, which provides a social safety net for its citizens. …

…Both the behavior of the American government and the Federal Reserve makes one thing clear: They do not see the solution to the US’s economic woes in a return to traditional American virtues. Obama is not calling for the unleashing of market forces, as Ronald Reagan once did during an equally critical period in the early 1980s. On the contrary: Obama, driven by his own convictions and advised by economists who believe in government intervention, has taken a path that leads far away from those things that catapulted America to the top of the world in the past century.

The Obama administration’s current policies rely on more government rather than personal responsibility and self-determination. They are administering to the patient more, not less, of exactly those things that led to the crisis. …

…This raises a crucial question: Is the US economy perhaps suffering less from an economic downturn and more from a serious structural problem? It seems plausible that the American economy has lost its belief in American principles. People no longer have confidence in the self-healing forces of the private sector, and the reliance on self-help and self-regulation to solve problems no longer exists.

…The settlers of the New World rejected everything, which included throwing out anything with a semblance of state authority. They fled Europe to find freedom. The sole shared goal of the settlers was to obtain individual freedom and live independently, which included the freedom to say what they wanted, believe what they wanted and write what they wanted. The state was seen as a way to facilitate this goal. The state should not interfere in people’s lives, aside from securing freedom, peace and security. Economic prosperity was seen as the responsibility of the individual. …

Charles Krauthammer thinks the president needs to focus on the war effort as well as his domestic initiatives.

…Yet the observation is obvious: It is surely harder to prevail in a war that hinges on the allegiance of the locals when they hear the U.S. president talk of beginning a withdrawal that will ultimately leave them to the mercies of the Taliban.

How did Obama come to this decision? “Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” an Obama adviser told the New York Times’ Peter Baker. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”

If this is true, then Obama’s military leadership can only be called scandalous. During the past week, 22 Americans were killed over a four-day period in Afghanistan. This is not a place about which decisions should be made in order to placate members of Congress, pass health care and thereby maintain a president’s political standing. This is a place about which a president should make decisions to best succeed in the military mission he himself has set out. …

In Forbes, John Tamny sets forth an excellent explanation of the additional costs taxpayers are forced to incur when federal workers receive higher salaries.

…If it’s true that government workers are more educated and in possession of greater skills, then it’s also true that a still-difficult economic situation has been made more difficult by virtue of some of our best and brightest offering their skills to the inefficient government sector over the private economy. Their gain is the recessed economy’s loss.

It should also be remembered the perverse incentives that exist among federal workers. Not able to advance based on profits, and doing more with less, workers in the government succeed the more the bureaucracy they work for grows, the more lawsuits they win against private actors, the more regulations they impose, and the more fines/fees they lift from the increasingly empty hands of the average American taxpayer.

Not only are we fleeced to cover the rising pay and gold-plated benefits of federal workers, we’re essentially paying them to make our lives more difficult. The more they’re able to do so, the more they advance. …

Michael Graham, in the Boston Herald, gives us a glimpse of how government is taking care of itself during the economic turmoil.

Hey President Obama, I found your “recovery!” It was hidden among the theater seats and swimming pools at Newton North High.

…Struggling taxpayers looking for prosperity just have to drive through Newton and check out the new 400,000 square-foot high school with its two theaters, two gymnasiums, its fully-functional television studio and an SOA or “simulated outdoor area.” Happy days are obviously here again when students are provided Kindle book readers and teachers use “interactive white boards” in wireless-tech classrooms. …

…Who cares if it cost more than $100,000 per pupil? We’re with the government and we’re livin’ large!

…And that’s the key. When you’re looking for recovery in an Obama economy, all the good news is in the government sector. In fact, if you just work near the government, Obamanomics is for you.

…The fact is, there is a recovery under way and no, we taxpaying private-sector workers were not left out. We get to pay for it.

Noel Sheppard points out Chris Matthews’ frustration with the teleprompted president, in Newsbusters.

…Near the end of a “Hardball” segment about the President’s prime time address to the nation Tuesday, the host said, “If he doesn’t get rid of that damn teleprompter…He’s just reading words now.”

Matthews continued, “It’s separating him from us.”

And continued, “You go to a meeting with him I’m told, businessmen are invited to meet him at the White House, he hauls out the damn teleprompter, and he reads it to them.”

“The teleprompter is a problem for this guy. I think it’s his menace”…

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Jeff Jacoby explains why Cash for Clunkers was a monumentally stupid piece of legislation.

…Why are used-car prices rocketing? Part of the answer is that demand is up: With unemployment high and the economy uncertain, some car buyers who might otherwise be looking for a new truck or SUV are instead shopping for a used vehicle as a way to save money.

But an even bigger part of the answer is that the supply of used cars is artificially low, because your Uncle Sam decided last year to destroy hundreds of thousands of perfectly good automobiles as part of its hare-brained Car Allowance Rebate System — or, as most of us called it, Cash for Clunkers. …

No great insight was needed to realize that Cash for Clunkers would work a hardship on people unable to afford a new car. “All this program did for them,’’ I wrote last August, “was guarantee that used cars will become more expensive. Poorer drivers will be penalized to subsidize new cars for wealthier drivers.’’ Alec Gutierrez, a senior analyst for Kelley Blue Book, predicted that used-car prices would surge by up to 10 percent. “It’s going to drive prices up on some of the most affordable vehicles we have on the road,’’ he told USA Today. In short, Washington spent nearly $3 billion to raise the price of mobility for drivers on a budget. …

Michael Barone looks at how Obama’s policies have worked to help big business and big labor, at taxpayers’ expense.

…The Obama Democrats, faced with a grave economic crisis, responded with policies appropriate to the Big Unit America that was disappearing during the president’s childhood.

Their financial policy has been to freeze the big banks into place. Their industrial policy was to preserve as much as they could of General Motors and Chrysler for the benefit of the United Auto Workers. Their health care policy was designed to benefit Big Pharma and other big players. Their housing policy has been to try to maintain existing prices. Their macroeconomic economic policy was to increase the size and scope of existing government agencies to what looks to be the bursting point.

What we see is Big Government colluding with Big Business and trying to breathe life into Big Labor. …

Liberals have long railed against big business, and conservatives have focused on the sins of big government and big labor. Each has only a piece of the puzzle, explains Warren Meyer. He looks at European states as a template to how the powerful in government and business are protecting each others’ positions, and gives a striking list of examples that show their collusion.

…In this three-way arrangement, unionized workers in key industries get high wages, guaranteed employment, rich pension systems and government protection from competition from younger and foreign workers. In return, they promise labor peace (barring the occasional strike to demonstrate their power) and tremendous election-day muscle.

Favored businesses (and by these we are talking about the top 20 to 30 largest banks and corporations in a particular country) get protection from competition, both upstart domestic entrepreneurs as well as any foreign rivals. In return, they provide monetary and political support for politicians’ pet projects–from recycling to windmills–with the understanding that politicians will give them legislative back doors to recover the costs of these programs from customers or taxpayers.

In return for granting this largess to selected corporations and unions, government officials get to remain in power. Typically this arrangement appeals to parties on both the left and the right, such that the nominal ruling party may change but the core group in power remain the same. …

…Like Europe, the ultimate price for the growing corporate state will be paid by the American consumer (in the form of higher prices, reduced choice, and foregone innovation), and the American taxpayer, who is already facing an enormous bill from the direct subsidy of favored constituents. This corporate-government-labor coalition is ready to come together in the U.S. right now, and only the political energy of the rest of the American citizenry continues to resist it.

Robert Costa interviews Patrick Caddell, a former Carter pollster, on the upcoming elections. Caddell says the anti-government sentiment is startling.

…On Monday, Gallup released a new weekly poll showing Republicans leading Democrats by an unprecedented ten-point margin, 51 to 41 percent, in congressional voting preferences — the largest gap in Gallup’s history of tracking the midterm generic ballot. “I have never seen numbers like this,” Caddell says, shaking his head. “Unless Republicans can find some way to screw it up, they will win big, even though nobody really likes them, either.”

Indeed, rather than a ringing endorsement of either major party, Caddell sees November as a broader referendum on the political class — the class, he says, to which Obama, and his political fate, are irrevocably tied.

…Caddell believes that 2010 will be a louder, more raucous moment than 1978 in American politics. “The discontent is much larger than the turnout at Glenn Beck rallies,” he says. “A sea of anger is churning — the tea parties are but the tip of the iceberg. People say they want to take their country back, and, to the Democrats’ chagrin, they’re very serious about it.” …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Robert Costa’s article.

In a fascinating interview with Robert Costa, Democratic pollster and analyst Pat Caddell zeroes in on the Democrats’ impending doom (”the general outcome is baked”) and on Obama’s failure to live up to expectations (”The killer in American politics is disappointment. When you are elected on expectations, and you fail to meet them, your decline steepens”). But his most cogent analysis focuses on Obama’s base. He writes:

“The people who own the party — George Soros, the Center for American Progress, the public-employee union bosses, rich folks flying private jets to “ideas festivals” in Aspen — they’re Obama’s base.”

Yowser. He omitted only the liberal media, but I suppose they too — along with young people, old people, Hispanics, working- and middle-class whites, and even 42 percent of Jews — have grown disillusioned as well. …

Jennifer Rubin and David Brooks liked Glenn Beck’s rally. (There’s a sentence you probably never thought you’d see.)

David Brooks couldn’t find a bad word to say about the Glenn Beck rally. Really. In his conversation with Gail Collins, she certainly tried to drag something negative out of him. But he liked what he saw:

I have to confess I really enjoyed it. I’m no Beck fan obviously, but the spirit was really warm, generous and uplifting. The only bit of unpleasantness I found emanated from some liberal gatecrashers behaving offensively, carrying anti-Beck banners and hoping to get in some televised fights. … There, at Saturday’s rally, were the most conservative people in the country, lauding Martin Luther King Jr. There they were, in the midst of their dismay, lavishly celebrating the basic institutions of American government. I have no problem with that.

…What seems to have flummoxed the left is that the Beck rally demonstrated that the populist anti-Obama faction in the country (some might use the mundane phrase “majority”) isn’t composed of wackos. They actually understand better than elites that the economic problems are in large part a function of a collapse in values. Obama likes to rail against Wall Street. Well, that’s a location. The ralliers want to talk about what went wrong with the people who populate business and government. They would say we have lost touch with essential values — thrift, persistence, responsibility, modesty, and, yes, faith in something beyond self and self-indulgence. As Brooks put it, “Every society has to engird capitalism in a restraining value system, or else it turns nihilistic and out of control.”

The chattering class should stop chattering long enough to listen to what citizens are saying. Not only is it quite reasonable; it is profound.

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David Goldman compares the lost decade of Japan with the economic mess here in our country.

…During Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s, everyone was working, everyone kept their homes, everyone maintained their lifestyle (minus some shopping trips to Paris), and life carried on more or less the same. America enters the second decade of the millennium with un- and underemployment around 20%.

Japan went through its great retirement wave in the 1990s, just as America must during the 2010s. But the Japanese for years had saved massively, and exported massively in order to do so. If a country’s population ages rapidly, the soon-to-retire cohort will shift from consumption into savings. Japan had insufficient young people to absorb the investment requirements of the 40- and 50-year-olds, and therefore had to invest overseas. Japan’s industrial genius made it the world’s premier exporter, and Japan was able to save successfully to fund the retirement wave–even though consumption remained weak and real estate prices fell and the stock market fell to a third of late 1980s peak.

How are Americans going to save? They can’t buy home mortgages; they could buy US Treasuries at 2.5% for a 10-year maturity; they can buy the junk bonds now flooding the market; or they can leave their money in cash at a fraction of a percent. As aging American shift from consumption to saving, they must do so by reducing domestic purchases. The Japanese could save by exporting and remain close to full employment. American’s savings requirement cannot be met in the same way, because Americans have forgotten how to export. There aren’t enough soybeans and corn to make much of a difference; with a few exceptions, America has lost its edge in capital goods as well as consumer goods, excepting commercial aircraft and a few other pockets of strength. …

James Glassman writing in Commentary on the failure of the liberal stimulus experiment.

… Perhaps a lack of stimulus spending would have made matters even worse. No one knows. You can’t do a controlled experiment. But you can understand the public reaction: We spent all this money, and got almost nothing.

Bastiat would have appreciated one of the obvious explanations for the impotence of the stimulus. In 1957, Milton Friedman argued that attempts to increase consumer demand through government spending are doomed. The reason, Friedman wrote, is that individuals make their decisions about consumption by looking at their likely income and wealth far into the future. (He called it the “permanent income hypothesis.”) If the government starts spending huge sums today, consumers foresee higher taxes and, by inference, presume that their lifetime incomes will drop because of the increased level of their tax burden.

If government spending is short-term or one-time-only, which is what the stimulus was supposed to be, then individuals might be expected to take a more benign view. But the 2009 stimulus did not take place in a vacuum. It was soon accompanied by other economic policies and proposals of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress: health-care reform extending public coverage to 30 million new people, cap-and-trade energy proposals featuring vastly higher taxes, and the imminent expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2010.

Because of these policies, the “unseen” became “seen” in a fashion devastating to the politicians supporting them. Americans judged that the party in power intends the radical expansion of the size of government in perpetuity. That expansion will have to be paid for. There is no reason to expect very much good from the future if you are the sort of person who generates income and creates jobs. Your “permanent income” is going to decline, and your gut response will be to husband your resources. …

… For the public, the worry extends beyond the debt itself to the very role of the federal government. According to Gallup, by a margin of 57 percent to 37 percent, Americans say there is “too much” rather than “not enough regulation of business by government.” Big business is unloved, but more and more, government is seen as clumsy, venal, and self-serving.

There is no denying that the narrative about how greedy financiers caused the economic crisis still has currency. But another narrative now looms larger. It is that the government’s attempts to fix the problem through spending have been ineffectual at best and, more likely, dangerous to our economic health.

When the financial meltdown occurred, it seemed almost certain that Americans would judge that the conservative economic experiment of 1981-2008 had failed. Instead, they seem to be leaning in the opposite direction—toward a conclusion that it was the liberal economic experiment of 2009-10 that has failed.

This conclusion is not being warmly embraced so much as reluctantly conceded. Things could change. Conservatives will face a challenge later this year over whether to extend tax cuts that, at least from a “seen” viewpoint, will further increase the debt. Still, when you consider that a repudiation of free-market capitalism and what President Sarkozy called a “return of the state” appeared almost certain when the crisis broke, we should be both humbled by and thankful for this strange and constructive turn of events.

In Forbes, Richard Epstein advocates scaling back government to allow the economy to grow.

…Our economic woes are so manifest that we have to look for an alternative strategy to getting out of the current hole. It will not do to take a fatalist attitude toward lackluster private demand. Something has to be done to revive it–now. Here is one agenda: reduce the level of economic uncertainty by getting government out of the stop and go business once and for all. What is needed are stable economic policies that work as well in good times and in bad ones, so as to remove the need to articulate and implement some nonexistent exit strategy.

There are only two ways to do this. The first is a set of permanent tax cuts on capital gains and high incomes, which will give our most productive individuals the incentive to invest and innovate that they so sorely lack today. The hostility of the Obama administration to these moves right now causes more harm than any public stimulus program can undo.

The second approach, on which Tyson and Krugman take a seeming vow of silence, is major deregulation to stimulate growth, while cutting wasteful government expenditures. No single regulatory program has the general pop of a sound fiscal or tax policy. But the cumulative effect of countless bad policies exerts a profound negative effect on both employment and growth. …

In the Economist blogs, W.W. in Iowa City, who we’ve heard from before, discusses different theories about the economic crisis, and then sums up the role that government played. What caused the credsis will be debated for decades, so we will keep highlighting items we believe add some clarity.

…I think it at least fair to say that it is very plausible that government policy played a central role in the crisis. If the combination of low interest rates, favourable tax treatment for residential capital gains, a web of heavily promoted initiatives to make it easier for lower and middle-income Americans to buy houses, regulations mandating the purchase of subprime loans, capital requirements goading banks into holding lots of “safe” assets do not “put government at the center of the crisis”, I can’t imagine what would. Which is not to say that the market did not fail. Indeed, it is impossible to specify what the market is in isolation from the rules that define the possibilities and terms of exchange. The market failed. And the market was what it was because government made it that way. …

The NRO staff post several of Charles Krauthammer’s remarks about the president. This one is accurate and bad news for the country:

…On whether ideology will keep Obama from changing his position on allowing the upper-income Bush tax cuts to expire:

“I’m not sure it’s entirely ideological. I think part of this is pure narcissism. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say I changed my mind or I was wrong. …”

Daniel Hannan comments on Greenland’s criticism of Greenpeace, in the Telegraph, UK, blogs.

…The prime minister of Greenland – a socialist, no less – has attacked Greenpeace for sabotaging an Arctic exploration rig. Kuupik Kleist is plainly not a politician given to circumlocution:

The cabinet regards Greenpeace’s action as very serious and an illegal attack on the country’s constitutional rights. It is worrying that Greenpeace, in their hunt for media exposure, violate security rules made to protect human lives and the environment.

…Lefties have always liked the idea that they are speaking for those who would otherwise have no voice – which is, of course, a very creditable motive. The trouble is that, when the previously voiceless do find their tongues, they often say things that their erstwhile protectors find awkward. A hundred years ago, socialists presumed to speak for the proletariat. When the proletariat turned out to have some uncomfortably conservative views, they shifted their attention to the oppressed peasantry of the Third World. When these, too, turned out not to have the correct opinions, they moved on to more recherché communities: hunter-gatherers in rainforests and the like. …

In Newsbusters, Noel Sheppard highlights a surprising conversation on Hardball.

A truly astonishing thing happened on MSNBC Monday: three devout, liberal Obama supporters said the President is responsible for people thinking he’s a Muslim.

During the opening segment of “Hardball,” in a discussion about Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally and how the host and attendees view Obama’s faith, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman said, “Barack Obama probably should have joined a church here…some things in politics you have to do at least for the symbolism.” …

The Economist reports on exciting new technology in a surprising place.

BIG crowds, strong surf and powerful rip currents are only a few of the obstacles that lifeguards must overcome to keep swimmers safe. Strong winds can pull many bathers out to sea simultaneously, overwhelming the guards if there are only a few of them. And, since average swimming speed is about 3kph (2mph) even a single rescue mission can take more than half an hour.

A profession ripe, then, for automation. And that automation is now at hand. Hydronalix, a marine-robotics firm based, rather surprisingly, in landlocked Arizona, has come up with EMILY—the Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard. This device, which is being tested at Zuma beach in Malibu, California, is a remote-controlled, 1.4-metre-long, 11kg buoy with a foam core covered by red canvas and surrounded by ropes. A human lifeguard can keep but a single person afloat. EMILY, by contrast, is buoyant enough to save five at a time. The ropes let swimmers cling to the device or climb on top of it until a lifeguard arrives on the scene. …

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Toby Harnden comments on the Ground Zero mosque controversy and interviews a Muslim man who is against the building location. Ahmed Sharif is an amazing example, though, for the positive attitude he has of America despite having been the victim of an anti-Muslim attack. 

It took a Manhattan taxi driver called Ahmed Sharif to speak out for America, which is being vilified as bigoted and Islamophobic because of the controversy generated by opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero mosque”.

The United States was his dream country, he enthused, and he loved New York City. “I feel like I belong here. This is the city actually [for] all colours, races, religion, everyone. We live here side by side peacefully.” …

…Ahmed Sharif, a victim of real anti-Muslim bigotry, stated that the attack on him was an aberration and that America is a land of tolerance and opportunity. What a shame that Obama, despite his much-vaunted gift with words, appears unable to speak about such things with similar eloquence.

Roger Simon responds with logic to the name-calling from the Left.

…With very minor exceptions, I have seen little irrational fear of Islam in our society. What I have seen is a lot of serious and justifiable dislike of the religion for its ideology — notably its heinous treatment of women and homosexuals and its opposition to the separation of church and state, all codified by its all-encompassing Sharia law that seeks to legislate all facets of existence while instituting a global caliphate.

Nevertheless, soi-disant liberals and progressives or whatever they want to call themselves accuse those who dislike Islam for those reasons of irrational fear.  …

… Today there are 1.5 billion adherents of Islam, 21% of the world’s population. Achieving a global caliphate is not entirely unlikely. Irrational fear or ideological battle?

Mark Helprin writes an eloquent explanation why the mosque should not be built near Ground Zero.

…Building close to Ground Zero disregards the passions, grief and preferences not only of most of the families of September 11th but, because we are all the families of September 11th, those of the American people as well, even if not the whole of the American people. If the project is to promote moderate Islam, why have its sponsors so relentlessly, without the slightest compromise, insisted upon such a sensitive and inflammatory setting? That is not moderate. It is aggressively militant.

Disregarding pleas to build it at a sufficient remove so as not to be linked to an abomination committed, widely praised, and throughout the world seldom condemned in the name of Islam, the militant proponents of the World Trade Center mosque are guilty of a poorly concealed provocation. They dare Americans to appear anti-Islamic and intolerant or just to roll over.

But the opposition to what they propose is no more anti-Islamic or intolerant than to protest a Shinto shrine at Pearl Harbor or Nanjing would be anti-Shinto or even anti-Japanese. How about a statue of Wagner at Auschwitz, a Russian war memorial in the Katyn Forest, or a monument to British and American air power at Dresden? The indecency of such things would be neither camouflaged nor burned away by the freedoms of expression and religion. And that is what the controversy is about, decency and indecency, not the freedom to worship, which no one denies. …

David Warren theorizes about some of the pressures that Islamist radicals are placing, directly and indirectly, on moderate Muslim communities.

…Reasonable Muslims and their children — trying to get on with their lives… — are the targets of a very sick propaganda, designed to persuade the psychologically unstable that Allah loves to kill infidels gratuitously. And over the world at large, Muslims are by far the most numerous victims of Islamist acts of carnage: quite literally tens of thousands killed and maimed in the time we’ve been counting since 9/11.

But when they look outside the community, they feel themselves being held responsible for a murderer’s creed. …

…Moreover, the very strategy of the Islamists is to isolate Muslim emigrant communities; to prevent their assimilation into the West and its (truly corrupted) values. In other words, to put every Muslim in a position where he is either with the Islamists, or against every aspect of his own identity. …

…The mosque insistence on distinctive Islamic dress contributes more to this separation, day by day, than isolated acts of terrorism.

Our media insistence on publicizing the more radical Islamic spokesmen, at the expense of the more reasonable, also contributes mightily to this by enhancing and promoting the radicals’ prestige. …

The president walked into this one. Peter Wehner comments with polling numbers on Obama’s response to the oil spill.

In his interview from New Orleans yesterday with NBC’s Brian Williams, commemorating the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, President Obama assured the world that his handling of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was not his administration’s Hurricane Katrina.

The president is right, if the people of Louisiana are to be believed. Mr. Obama’s handling of the BP oil spill is judged by them to be considerably worse than how Bush reacted to Katrina.

A Public Policy Polling survey reports this:

The oil spill in the Gulf may be mostly out of the headlines now but Louisiana voters aren’t getting any less mad at Barack Obama about his handling of it. Only 32% give Obama good marks for his actions in the aftermath of the spill, while 61% disapprove.

Louisianans are feeling more and more that George W. Bush’s leadership on Katrina was better than Obama’s on the spill. 54% think Bush did the superior job of helping the state through a crisis to 33% who pick Obama. …

Peter Wehner also blogs on the president’s good work spreading conservative ideas.

Here’s the latest from Gallup:

“Republicans lead by 51% to 41% among registered voters in Gallup weekly tracking of 2010 congressional voting preferences. The 10-percentage-point lead is the GOP’s largest so far this year and is its largest in Gallup’s history of tracking the midterm generic ballot for Congress.”

What Barack Obama is doing for the fortunes of the GOP is nearly unmatched by anyone in modern political history.

Michael Barone looks at the anti-liberal mood in two places minimally affected by the recession.

…In Alaska, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski was expected to be easily renominated over Fairbanks lawyer and political newcomer Joe Miller.
But the voters had other ideas.

In Alaska, Miller’s narrow lead of 1,668 votes may vanish as at least 7,600 absentee and mail ballots are counted.

…Whatever the final outcomes, there are lessons to be learned. One is that the current unpopularity of leftist parties in the Anglosphere (Republicans lead Democrats by a record margin in polls on voting for the U.S. House) are not just a reaction to bad economic times.

…Murkowski was hurt by her assertion in debate that the Constitution put no limits on Congress’s ability to make laws.  She won votes from Alaska insiders and Alaska Natives for supporting spending on local programs, but not as many as local pundits expected. …

In the WSJ, Kelly Evans reports on the reintroduction of the Austrian school of economics, and the man, Peter J. Boettke, who is leading the charge. Evans also pinpoints the challenge for these economists: how to scale back government intervention and allow the needed market corrections to occur.

Peter J. Boettke, shuffling around in a maroon velour track suit or faux-leather rubber shoes he calls “dress Crocs,” hardly seems like the type to lead a revolution.

But the 50-year-old professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia is emerging as the intellectual standard-bearer for the Austrian school of economics that opposes government intervention in markets and decries federal spending to prop up demand during times of crisis. Mr. Boettke, whose latest research explores people’s ability to self-regulate, also is minting a new generation of disciples who are spreading the Austrian approach throughout academia, where it had long been left for dead. …

…It wasn’t a lack of government oversight that led to the crisis, as some economists argue, but too much of it, Mr. Boettke says. …

…But as much as the Austrian diagnosis may resonate now, it doesn’t provide a playbook for what to do next, which could limit its current resurgence. …

In Forbes, Paul Johnson asks whether a college education is worth the investment.

…The quality of higher education received seems to bear no relation to the success or failure of most Presidents. The two greatest, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, had to learn the hard way. On the other hand, another distinguished President, Woodrow Wilson, first attracted notice as president of Princeton.

It is striking how much or how little great inventors and scientists learned at university. Thomas Edison never attended one, discovering his genius instead while working as a teenage telegraph operator. Charles Darwin went to Cambridge to study for the church but derived the greatest benefit to his career during long rambles with J.S. Henslow, a professor of botany. Darwin was known in his student days as “the man who walks with Henslow.” What Cambridge did give Darwin was the opportunity to reinforce his capacity to work hard and systematically and to expand the range of his enquiring mind.

Indeed, the study of universities and the great men and women who have attended them leads me to think that the best of these schools are characterized not so much by what they teach and how they teach it but by the extent they provide opportunities and encouragement for students to teach themselves. The best also help to instill certain intellectual virtues in young minds, including respect for the indispensable foundation of democracy, the rule of law; the need to back up opinions with clear arguments, empirical evidence and hard work; the varying importance of resolute conviction and friendly compromise, when appropriate; open-mindedness at all times; and the perpetual need for courage in the pursuit of truth. …

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Ed Morrissey kicks the day off with a rundown of Obama’s self-congratulatory address on the US forces reduction in Iraq.

Yesterday, I wrote that Barack Obama had an opportunity to at least share a little credit for the close of combat operations in Iraq with George W. Bush, who wrote the plan for drawing down American troops in Iraq that Obama has followed to the letter, rather than go for Obama’s repeatedly promised all-out 16-month retreat plan from 2007. If his weekly address is any indication, the American electorate will have to wait for some other opportunity for its Chief Executive to show a little class. …

Total mentions of Bush: zero. Total mentions of victory: zero. Total mentions of “I” in speech: six…

Conrad Black, in the National Review, takes an interesting walk through America’s history to see where things went off track.

…The great U.S. economy, a stupefying engine of productivity and applied talent, became a mighty Ponzi scheme, as the whole nation, addicted to debt-paid instant gratification, spent the future on consumption and non-durable assets. Except for a few academic flakes, no one — business, government, academia, the financial press — saw what was coming. And so there is no obvious body of vindicated opinion to take over now; it is a terrible and vacuous crisis of leadership. And courage fled, arm-in-arm, with official judgment. The Congress and successive administrations ignored illegal immigration until border-state frictions made it an explosive issue, and have failed to address it seriously since. They ignored abortion, leaving it to the ill-qualified bench to determine when the unborn attain the rights of a person. They ignored income disparity, until the recession stared to shrink the disparity by reducing everyone’s net worth, and they ignore the debt bomb. Annual increases of $750 billion to $1.4 trillion in the money supply stretching forward a decade will destroy the currency and Weimarize America, and there is not a hint of an official preventive response. The Keynesian injection of spending has been shot, in a hare-brained stimulus package designed by cynical Democratic congressional-committee chairmen. The recession is still here, and most tax increases and spending reductions are hazardous to economic growth. No one leads and no one knows.

…What is needed is a colossal reorientation of the country away from consumption and toward investment, the cleaning out of the morass of the plea-bargain justice system and attendant vacuum cleaners of the legal and prison industries (and the gigantic fraud of the War on Drugs), drastic education reform, genuine health-care reform, a redefinition of U.S. national interests in the world to what is essential and defensible, and then restructured alliances to reflect shared interests. Until those issues are addressed, all talk of the American superpower is rubbish. Obama’s is the fourth consecutive failed administration, and each succeeding one will make the festering problems more dangerous and difficult. As the problem is misdirection, not internal degeneracy or imperial overreach, it is a decline that will end in recovery, not a fall. It is like a non-terminal illness: America awaits a correct diagnosis, a curative plan, and a competent professional to supervise the recovery. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on an article about Obama’s unease with military aspects of the presidency.

It is not that we didn’t know this before, but reading the New York Times – surely designed to be as favorable toward Obama as the reporter could possibly manage — one is left slack-jawed. Obama doesn’t like being commander in chief, isn’t good at it, and has relied [on] one tutor, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who is leaving next year. The report should be read in full. But a few low-lights:

…Even as he draws down troops in Iraq, he has been abundantly willing to use force to advance national interests, tripling forces in Afghanistan, authorizing secret operations in Yemen and Somalia, and escalating drone strikes in Pakistan. But advisers said he did not see himself as a war president in the way his predecessor did. His speech on Tuesday is notable because he talks in public about the wars only sporadically, determined not to let them define his presidency.

A former adviser to the president, who like others insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the situation candidly, said that Mr. Obama’s relationship with the military was ‘troubled’ and that he ‘doesn’t have a handle on it.’ …

…This was a man not only unprepared to be president but disposed to shirk the most important aspect of the job. It is a measure of his hubris and stubbornness that he has refused to, as Feaver succinctly puts it, “embrace” the role, that is, to commit in word and deed his full attention and effort to leading the country in war. He doesn’t want to be a wartime president? Well, sorry — he is.

In Contentions, J.E. Dyer discusses a strategy that he sees the Obami employing.

Evelyn Gordon’s post from Thursday highlights a Team Obama method that increasingly comes across as precious, annoying, and insidious. I’m not sure there’s a single word to describe it, but it involves a sort of inversion by which the administration of policy conveniently supersedes the purpose and substance of policy. In some cases, obstacles are allowed to dictate outcomes as if the U.S. administration has no discretion over them. In other cases, bureaucratic arcana serve as dodges. And in others, like Obama’s approach to Iran, procedural checklists are wielded as surrogates for policy, generating a kind of lottery in which we all watch to see what fate the procedures will eventually confer on us. …

George Will writes that improving educational achievement for black children requires significant changes outside the classroom.

…Now, from the Educational Testing Service, comes a report about “The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped,” written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley. …

…the ETS report says: “It is very hard to imagine progress resuming in reducing the education attainment and achievement gap without turning these family trends around — i.e., increasing marriage rates, and getting fathers back into the business of nurturing children.” And: “It is similarly difficult to envision direct policy levers” to effect that.

…Two decades have passed since Barton wrote “America’s Smallest School: The Family.” He has estimated that about 90 percent of the difference in schools’ proficiencies can be explained by five factors: the number of days students are absent from school, the number of hours students spend watching television, the number of pages read for homework, the quantity and quality of reading material in the students’ homes — and, much the most important, the presence of two parents in the home. Public policies can have little purchase on these five, and least of all on the fifth.

In the WSJ, Eric Felten writes about a Harvard professor in evolutionary psychology who thinks like a global warming scientist.

Harvard University announced last Friday that its Standing Committee on Professional Conduct had found Marc Hauser, one of the school’s most prominent scholars, guilty of multiple counts of “scientific misconduct.” The revelation came after a three-year inquiry into allegations that the professor had fudged data in his research on monkey cognition. Since the studies were funded, in part, by government grants, the university has sent the evidence to the Feds. …

…Evolutionary psychologists tell elaborate stories explaining modern life based on the conditions and circumstances of our prehistoric ancestors—even though we know very little about those factors. …

…Mr. Hauser had boldly declared that through his application of science, not only could morality be stripped of any religious hocus-pocus, but philosophy would have to step aside as well: “Inquiry into our moral nature will no longer be the proprietary province of the humanities and social sciences,” he wrote. …

…It’s important to note that the Hauser affair also represents the best in science. When lowly graduate students suspected their famous boss was cooking his data, they risked their careers and reputations to blow the whistle on him. They are the scientists to celebrate. …

The Economist has more on the Harvard problems, the associated charges and the consequences for science.

…So far, none of this constitutes conclusive evidence of fraud. Slapdash lab work is not the same as fabricating data and Harvard has kept mum about the precise nature of the charges, citing concerns about privacy. Many researchers, however, fear that this silence itself makes things worse—and not just for Dr Hauser and Harvard. The uncertainty about which of his results (for he has been a prolific researcher) are up to snuff means others in the field are finding it hard to decide what to rely on in their own work. And despite Dr Hauser’s professed sole responsibility, a sizeable number of his present and former wards may unfairly be tainted by association.

At the least, then, Dr Hauser stands accused of setting the study of animal cognition back many years. Trying to discern an animal’s thought processes on the basis of its behaviour is notoriously tricky and subjective at the best of times. Now, his critics fear, no one will take it seriously. As Greg Laden, one of Dr Hauser’s former colleagues, laments in a blog, “the hubris and selfishness of one person can do more in the form of damage than an entire productive career can do in the way of building of our collective credibility.” …

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The first five quarters following the 1981-2 recession averaged growth rates of 6.2%. The first four quarters following 2008-9 recession have averaged 3.0%  The fourth quarter out in the first period had growth of 8,1%. Friday we learned the fourth quarter this time had growth of 1.6%   The WSJ editors have the story.

To no one’s surprise except perhaps Vice President Joe Biden’s, second quarter economic growth was revised down yesterday to 1.6% from the prior estimate of 2.4%, which was down from first quarter growth of 3.7%, which was down from the 2009 fourth quarter’s 5%. Economic recoveries are supposed to go in the other direction….

… Now that the failure is becoming obvious, the liberal explanation is that things would have been worse without all of this government care and feeding. The same economists who recommended the stimulus are now producing studies, based on their Keynesian demand models, claiming that it “saved or created” millions of jobs, even as the overall economy has lost millions of jobs. The counterfactual is impossible to disprove, but the American people can see the reality with their own eyes. … 

In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff looks back at predictions about the economic recovery.

…The major mental block is that most economists believe that an economy grows as a result of spending. Any policy that encourages spending and discourages savings and investment is considered beneficial. Unfortunately, these policies, which only succeed in growing debt and government, act more as an economic sedative than a stimulant.

On the subject of the “recovery,” I’d like to highlight some of my past predictions, and those of my colleague Michael Pento. With the benefit of hindsight, you can see that although these thoughts were widely dismissed as chronic pessimism at the time of their publication, the current situation supports our conclusions. Although some of our predictions, like for higher bond yields, have yet to materialize. …

Selections from the writings of Michael Pento, Chief Economist at Euro Pacific Capital:

June 30, 2010

“The cause of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and the Great Recession beginning in 2007, was one and the same: an overleveraged economy. Excessive debt levels are the direct result of the central bank providing artificially low interest rates and of superfluous lending on the part of commercial banks.

The easy money provided by banks eventually brings debt in the economy to an unsustainable level. At that point, the only real and viable solution is for the public and private sectors to undergo a protracted period of deleveraging. The ensuing depression is, in actuality, the healing process at work, which is marked by the selling of assets and the paying down of debt. Unfortunately, our politicians today are focused on fighting this natural healing process by promoting the accumulation of more debt.”

The Economist blogger “W.W.” from Iowa City comments on what caused the credsis.

… this is a story about how policies intended to reduce inequality had the unintended consequence of precipitating America’s worst economic slump since the Depression. It’s very important that we’re straight on what the story is, since different stories may have very different implications for policy. If the story is that the level of inequality itself—and not our ideas about or political reactions to it—indirectly caused the crisis, then we may think that narrowing the gap is a matter of urgent necessity. But if the story is that an ill-conceived political attempt to reduce inequality—and not the fact of inequality itself—led to apocalyptic economic devastation, then we may well conclude that it is better to refrain from equalising initiatives unless we are quite certain they will not backfire. …

We have another good editorial from the WSJ editors on Intel’s CEO, Paul Otellini, discussing the government policies and taxes that hurt the economy.

American business leaders were remarkably quiescent during the Obama Administration’s first 18 months, but more are now speaking up as the threats to the economic recovery and long-term U.S. prosperity become more serious. The latest is Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who warned a technology forum this week that without a change in U.S. government policy “the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here. And wealth will not accrue here. Ultimately, we will face an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth—much like we are witnessing today in Europe.”

The bulk of Mr. Otellini’s remarks was pitched broadly at long-term U.S. problems, many of which predate the current Administration. Like many other CEOs, he lamented the decline in U.S. education performance relative to emerging nations. And he focused in particular on the hostile U.S. tax climate that he said is undermining a “culture of investment” that has long been an American comparative advantage.

“Our combined state and federal corporate income tax rate”—about 38%—”is the second highest in the industrial world. It is precisely these high statutory corporate rates that punish the most dynamic and innovative firms and hinders their ability to compete globally,” Mr. Otellini said. “I can tell you that it costs $1 billion more to build, equip and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the U.S. Ninety percent of the cost difference is the result of tax and incentive policies. With such policies, are we surprised that companies are investing overseas?”…

In CNet, Declan McCullagh has more remarks from Paul Otellini and others on how our government makes it tough for businesses to grow.

…Otellini singled out the political state of affairs in Democrat-dominated Washington, saying: “I think this group does not understand what it takes to create jobs. And I think they’re flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working.”

Since an unusually sharp downturn accelerated in late 2008, the Obama administration and its allies in the U.S. Congress have enacted trillions in deficit spending they say will create an economic stimulus but have not extended the Bush tax cuts and have pushed to levy extensive new health care and carbon regulations on businesses.

“They’re in a ‘Do’ loop right now trying to figure out what the answer is,” Otellini said.

As a result, he said, “every business in America has a list of more variables than I’ve ever seen in my career.” If variables like capital gains taxes and the R&D tax credit are resolved correctly, jobs will stay here, but if politicians make decisions “the wrong way, people will not invest in the United States. They’ll invest elsewhere.” …

David Goldman has two topics in this blog. He lists his top twenty reasons why the economy isn’t recovering, and he discusses the effects of demographics on various economies. Here are three of his reasons why a recovery is still far off:

…State and local pension funds are being called out on their $3 trillion deficit (actually higher if returns remain as dodgy as I think they will be).

…State and local tax increases will be required in huge volume, either directly, or indirectly through privatization of municipal services, which in turn will lead to layoffs of bloated staffs and price increases.

…The Obama administration will rescind the Bush tax cuts, adding a federal tax increase to the miseries already conspiring to take the economy down.

The Economist has a cheap way to lose weight.

CONSUME more water and you will become much healthier, goes an old wives’ tale. Drink a glass of water before meals and you will eat less, goes another. Such prescriptions seem sensible, but they have little rigorous science to back them up.

Until now, that is. A team led by Brenda Davy of Virginia Tech has run the first randomised controlled trial studying the link between water consumption and weight loss. A report on the 12-week trial, published earlier this year, suggested that drinking water before meals does lead to weight loss. At a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston this week, Dr Davy unveiled the results of a year-long follow-up study that confirms and expands that finding. …

…Why this works is obscure. But work it does. It’s cheap. It’s simple. And unlike so much dietary advice, it seems to be enjoyable too.

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We start off with an excellent article on the Middle East peace process by George Will.

…The biggest threat to peace might be the peace process — or, more precisely, the illusion that there is one. The mirage becomes the reason for maintaining its imaginary “momentum” by extorting concessions from Israel, the only party susceptible to U.S. pressure. Israel is, however, decreasingly susceptible. In one month, history will recycle when the partial 10-month moratorium on Israeli construction on the West Bank expires. Resumption of construction — even here, in the capital, which was not included in the moratorium — will be denounced by a fiction, “the international community,” as a threat to another fiction, “the peace process.”

This, even though no Israeli government of any political hue has ever endorsed a ban on construction in Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, where about 40 percent of the capital’s Jewish population lives. Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon, who says “the War of Independence has not ended” 62 years after 1948, says of an extension of the moratorium: “The prime minister is opposed to it. He said that clearly. The decision was for 10 months. [On] Sept. 27, we are immediately going to return” to construction and “Jerusalem is outside the discussion.”

Predictably, Palestinian officials are demanding that the moratorium be extended as the price of their willingness to continue direct talks with Israel — which begin Sept. 2 — beyond Sept. 27. If this demand succeeds, history will remain cyclical: The “peace process” will be sustained by rewarding the Palestinian tactic of making the mere fact of negotiations contingent on Israeli concessions concerning matters that should be settled by negotiations.

And we have an encore presentation from Mark Steyn on the tragic change in Turkey.

…Ten years ago, Turkey’s behavior would have been unthinkable. Ankara was Israel’s best friend in a region where every other neighbor wishes, to one degree or another, the Jewish state’s destruction. Even when Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP was elected to power eight years ago, the experts assured us there was no need to worry. I remember sitting in a plush bar late one night with a former Turkish foreign minister, who told me, in between passing round the cigars and chugging back the Scotch, that, yes, the new crowd weren’t quite so convivial in the wee small hours but, other than that, they knew where their interests lay. Like many Turkish movers and shakers of his generation, my drinking companion loved the Israelis. “They’re tough hombres,” he said admiringly. “You have to be in this part of the world.” If you had suggested to him that in six years’ time the Turkish prime minister would be telling the Israeli president to his face that “I know well how you kill children on beaches,” he would have dismissed it as a fantasy concoction for some alternative universe. …

…As the think-tankers like to say: “Who lost Turkey?” In a nutshell: Kemal Ataturk. Since he founded post-Ottoman Turkey in his own image nearly nine decades ago, the population has increased from 14 million to over 70 million. But that five-fold increase is not evenly distributed. The short version of Turkish demographics in the 20th century is that Rumelian Turkey — i.e., western, European, secular, Kemalist Turkey — has been outbred by Anatolian Turkey — i.e., eastern, rural, traditionalist, Islamic Turkey. Ataturk and most of his supporters were from Rumelia, and they imposed the modern Turkish republic on a reluctant Anatolia, where Ataturk’s distinction between the state and Islam was never accepted. Now they don’t have to accept it. The swelling population has spilled out of its rural hinterland and into the once solidly Kemalist cities. …

…Some Western “experts” like to see this as merely a confident, economically buoyant Turkey’s “re-Ottomanization.” But the virulent anti-Semitism emanating from Erdogan’s fief is nothing to do with the old-time caliphate (where, unlike rebellious Arabs, the Jews were loyal or at least quiescent subjects), and all but undistinguishable from the globalized hyper-Islam successfully seeded around the world by Wahhabist money and so enthusiastically embraced by third-generation Euro-Muslims. Since 9/11, many of us have speculated about Muslim reform, in the Arab world and beyond. It’s hard to recall now but just a few years ago there was talk about whether General Musharraf would be Pakistan’s Ataturk. Instead, what we’re witnessing is the most prominent example of Muslim reform being de-reformed, before our very eyes, in nothing flat. …

Caroline Glick covers a lot of ground in her article on Iran’s nuclear development. We highlight only one part.

…Iran’s nuclear weapons program has spurred a regional nuclear arms race. Riedel imagines a bipolar nuclear Middle East, with Israel on the one side and Iran on the other. He fails to notice that already today Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan and Turkey have all initiated nuclear programs.

…A recent Zogby/University of Maryland poll of Arab public opinion taken for the Brookings Institute in US-allied Arab states Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the UAE shows that the Arab world is populated by jihadists.

As Herb London from the Hudson Institute pointed out in an analysis of the poll, nearly 70 percent of those polled said the leader they most admire is either a jihadist or a supporter of jihad.

The most popular leaders were Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Hizbullah chieftain Hassan Nasrallah, Syrian President Bashar Assad and al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. …

In the Telegraph, UK, Nile Gardiner blogs about how Dems are acknowledging that the November elections are not looking good for progressives.

Influential Washington news site Politico has a major piece this morning revealing mounting fears among leading Democrats over worsening prospects for retaining control of the House of Representatives in this November’s mid-terms. …

…The defeatism on the Left strikingly highlighted in this piece is the culmination of a disastrous summer of discontent for the White House, where the president’s approval ratings have plummeted against a backdrop of relentlessly bad economic news, a virtual civil war within the ruling liberal elites, and the impressive rise of the anti-establishment Tea Party movement . As I’ve written previously, we’ve witnessed the most stunning and rapid political decline for a US president in recent American history. …

…The Obama agenda has in many ways been an extraordinary and unprecedented assault on the free enterprise system that made the United States the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. It has succeeded not only in making America weaker, poorer and gravely more indebted, but also in eroding the very principles of liberty and freedom upon which it is based. The backlash will be huge. This November, the sinking Obama presidency is heading for a political iceberg that will rock the foundations not only of Capitol Hill, but the White House as well.

Charles Krauthammer eloquently explains how liberals are the cause of their undoing.

…And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims — a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, “just downright mean”?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

David Brooks comments on what the government should be doing for the economy. Below are a few places in the article where he almost sounds conservative.

During the first half of this year, German and American political leaders engaged in an epic debate. American leaders argued that the economic crisis was so bad, governments should borrow billions to stimulate growth. German leaders argued that a little short-term stimulus was sensible, but anything more was near-sighted. What was needed was not more debt, but measures to balance budgets and restore confidence.

…The German economy … is growing at a sizzling (and obviously unsustainable) 9 percent annual rate. Unemployment in Germany has come down to pre-crisis levels.

…Over the past few years, the Germans have built on their advantages. They effectively support basic research and worker training. They have also taken brave measures to minimize their disadvantages. As an editorial from the superb online think tank e21 reminds us, the Germans have recently reduced labor market regulation, increased wage flexibility and taken strong measures to balance budgets. …

Thomas Sowell recommends Sally Pipes’ new book, The Truth About Obamacare.

…Instead, the media spin is that various countries with government-run medical systems have life expectancies that are as long as ours, or longer. That is very clever as media spin, if you don’t bother to stop and think about it.

Author Sally Pipes did bother to stop and think about it in her book, “The Truth About ObamaCare.” She points out that medical care is just one of the factors in life expectancy.

She cites a study by Professors Ohsfeldt and Schneider at the University of Iowa, which shows that, if you leave out people who are victims of homicide or who die in automobile accidents, Americans live longer than people in any other Western country.

.. In the things that doctors can affect, such as the survival rates of cancer patients, the United States leads the world. …