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Fouad Ajami comments on the political end of Obama’s presidency.

…There is little evidence that the Obama presidency could yet find new vindication, another lease on life. Mr. Obama will mark time, but henceforth he will not define the national agenda. He will not be the repository of its hopes and sentiments. The ambition that his would be a “transformational” presidency—he rightly described Reagan’s stewardship in these terms—is for naught. …

…It is in the nature of charisma that it rises out of thin air, out of need and distress, and then dissipates when the magic fails. The country has had its fill with a scapegoating that knows no end from a president who had vowed to break with recriminations and partisanship. The magic of 2008 can’t be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.

In the Telegraph, UK, Nile Gardiner discusses our version of Marie Antoinette and the coming liberation in November.

…It is the kind of impunity that has been highlighted on the world stage this week by Michelle Obama’s hugely costly trip to Spain, which has prompted a New York Post columnist Andrea Tantaros to dub the First Lady a contemporary Marie Antoinette. As The Telegraph reports, while the Obamas are covering their own vacation expenses such as accommodation, the trip may cost US taxpayers as much as $375,000 in terms of secret service security and flight costs on Air Force Two.

The timing of this lavish European vacation could not have come at a worse moment, when unemployment in America stands at 10 percent, and large numbers of Americans are fighting to survive financially in the wake of the global economic downturn. It sends a message of indifference, even contempt, for the millions of Americans who are struggling just to feed their families on a daily basis and pay the mortgage, while the size of the national debt balloons to Greek-style proportions. …

…There is however a political revolution fast approaching Washington that is driven not by mob rule but by the power of ideas and principles, based upon the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. It is a distinctly conservative revolution that is sweeping America and is reflected in almost every poll ahead of this November’s mid-terms. It is based on a belief in individual liberty, limited government, and above all, political accountability from the ruling elites. The Obama administration’s mantra may well be “let them eat cake”, as it continues to gorge itself on taxpayers’ money, but it will be looking nervously over its shoulder as public unease mounts.

David Harsanyi advocates a balanced budget amendment to control the addicts in power in Washington.

The first step in any recovery is accepting that you can’t control your addictions. So, while Republicans may stumble back into power, they should admit that, like Democrats, they probably can’t be trusted to control themselves.

That’s why it’s nice to hear that four Senate Republicans — Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Tom Coburn — are moving forward with a balanced budget amendment — requiring that the federal government spend no more than it takes in. …

…Most of all, one hopes that Republicans are laying genuine groundwork for a federal balanced budget amendment, which has failed by agonizingly slender margins on a number of occasions. After decades of grousing from alternating parties about reckless spending, here’s a chance to constrain Washington, whether it wants to be constrained or not.

Up to this point, most of the opposition to the proposal has been based on one argument: Republicans are a bunch of silly hypocrites for failing to pass this when they were in charge of both houses and the presidency — and, need it be reiterated, were busy creating their own debt. Which, of course, is only another argument to support the amendment.

Tony Blankley comments on the opinions of the nation and what we may see from Washington in the future.

…Despite itself, a majority GOP, driven powerfully by the unambiguous vox populi of such an election, almost certainly would go about trying to repeal Obamacare and put serious, current-fiscal-year spending cuts into place – necessarily including “entitlements.” Republicans would try to reduce some taxes and start serious oversight of federal regulatory intrusions into traditional American freedoms – including a powerful push-back on administration regulatory efforts on climate change, illegal immigration and other left-wing agenda items. With sufficient votes in the Senate, they would block future liberal judicial appointments – from the trial court to the Supreme Court.

If they didn’t go all-out for such a basic conservative agenda in 2011 after such an election as is possible, Republican Party leaders would know that across the nation, even 50-year party regulars such as I would walk out and seek a third party to carry out the people’s business. …

…Two months ago, though, a poll by the Democracy Corps, a polling group run by Democratic operative James Carville and Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, asked how well the term “socialist” fit President Obama. Fifty-five percent of all Americans said “well” or “very well.” In that same month, the Gallup poll reported that Americans self-identify themselves as 42 percent conservative (a historic high), 35 percent moderate and 20 percent liberal. …

Robert Samuelson looks at the politics of population decline.

Among the government’s most interesting reports is one that estimates what parents spend on their children. Not surprisingly, the costs are steep. For a middle-class, husband-and-wife family (average pretax income in 2009: $76,250), spending per child is about $12,000 a year. Assuming modest annual inflation (2.8 percent), the report estimates that the family’s spending on a child born in 2009 would total $286,050 by age 17. A two-child family would cost about $600,000. All these estimates may be understated, because they don’t include college costs.

These dry statistics ought to inform the deficit debate, because a budget is not just a catalog of programs and taxes. It reflects a society’s priorities and values. Our society does not—despite rhetoric to the contrary—put much value on raising children. Present budget policies punish parents, who are taxed heavily to support the elderly. Meanwhile, tax breaks for children are modest. If deficit reduction aggravates these biases, more Americans may choose not to have children or to have fewer children. Down that path lies economic decline.

Societies that cannot replace their populations discourage investment and innovation. They have stagnant or shrinking markets for goods and services. With older populations, they resist change. …

Thomas Sowell gives us another example of what is wrong with schools today.

A graduating senior at Hunter College High School in New York gave a speech that brought a standing ovation from his teachers and got his picture in the New York Times. I hope it doesn’t go to his head, because what he said was so illogical that it was an indictment of the mush that is being taught at even our elite educational institutions. …

…Young Mr. Hudson’s concern, apparently, is about what he referred to as the “demographics” of the school– 41 percent white and 47 percent Asian, with blacks, Hispanics and others obviously far behind. “I refuse to accept” that “the distribution of intelligence in this city” varies by neighborhood, he said.

Native intelligence may indeed not vary by neighborhood but actual performance– whether in schools, on the job or elsewhere– involves far more than native intelligence. Wasted intelligence does nothing for an individual or society. …

Walter Williams helps dispel the liberal version of the Great Depression.

…The Great Depression did not end until after WWII. Why it lasted so long went unanswered until Harold L. Cole, professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Lee E. Ohanian, professor of economics at UCLA, published their research project “How Government Prolonged the Depression” in the Journal of Political Economy (August 2004). Professor Cole explained, “The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes. Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.” Professors Cole and Ohanian argue that FDR’s economic policies added at least seven years to the depression. …

…Between 1787 and 1930, our nation has seen both mild and severe economic downturns, sometimes called panics, that have ranged from one to seven years. During that interval, no one considered it to be the business of the federal government to try to get the economy out of a depression because there was no constitutional authority to do so. It took Hoover, FDR and a frightened and derelict U.S. Supreme Court to turn what might have been a three- or four-year sharp downturn into a 15-year meltdown.

RealClearPolitics.com highlights an article from the Boston Herald by Deroy Murdock. Murdock comments on the fight to stop Obamacare and what the elections could do.

…Americans increasingly would applaud such a House vote. A July 30-31 Rasmussen survey shows that among 1,000 likely voters, 59 percent want ObamaCare overturned. Despite relentless Democratic preening over ObamaCare, pro-repeal sentiments have risen from 55 percent (42 percent opposed) on March 24, when Obama signed this bill.

The American people can kill this monster in its crib. Handing Republicans the keys to Congress on Nov. 2 could smother this $2.5 trillion extravagance in its infancy. While a GOP repeal vote surely would earn a presidential veto, a Republican Congress could defund this law’s implementation.
Instead, Republicans should administer a pro-market antidote to ObamaCare’s poison: Health-insurance vouchers, medical malpractice reform; universal, tax-free Health Savings Accounts; and individual, portable medical plans – all available across state lines. …

 In the Whittier Daily News, Hector Gonzalez reports on the cool summer that southern California is experiencing. Sorry, Al.

It hasn’t been the coolest summer on record, but it’s been close, forecasters say.

The average temperature in July was 79 degrees, five degrees below normal, and the first eight days of this month also have been five to six degrees below normal, weather experts said.

That could put Southern California on track for a near-record-low summer, but it’s still too early to say, according to weather experts. The Los Angeles area, in fact, has had below-normal temperatures every month since April. …

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From Commentary we learn the politically correct thundering ignorance of the president was on display yet again, this time at the Hiroshima remembrance when for the first time the American ambassador attended.

That this should occur during the administration of Barack Obama is no surprise. No previous American president has been at such pains to apologize for what he thinks are America’s sins. So while, thankfully, Ambassador John Roos did not speak at the Hiroshima event, the import of his presence there was undeniable.

In theory, there ought to be nothing wrong with an American representative appearing in Hiroshima. Mourning the loss of so many lives in the bombing is both understandable and appropriate. But the problem lies in the way Japan remembers World War II. One of the reasons why it would have been appropriate for the United States to avoid its official presence at this ceremony is that the Japanese have never taken full responsibility for their own conduct during the war that the Hiroshima bombing helped end. Indeed, to listen to the Japanese, their involvement in the war sounds limited to the incineration of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the fire bombings of many other urban centers in the country, followed by a humiliating American occupation. The horror of the two nuclear bombs didn’t just wipe out two cities and force Japan’s government to finally bow to the inevitable and surrender. For 65 years it has served as a magic event that has erased from the collective memory of the Japanese people the vicious aggression and countless war crimes committed against not only the Allied powers but also the peoples of Asia who fell under their cruel rule in the 1930s and 1940s.

Five years ago The Weekly Standard published a lengthy review of the surprises that came from a release of all the “Magic” intercepts of Japanese signals.

… Starting with the publication of excerpts from the diaries of James Forrestal in 1951, the contents of a few of the diplomatic intercepts were revealed, and for decades the critics focused on these. But the release of the complete (unredacted) “Magic” Far East Summary, supplementing the Diplomatic Summary, in the 1990s revealed that the diplomatic messages amounted to a mere trickle by comparison with the torrent of military intercepts. The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan’s armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion. American politicians would then gladly negotiate an end to the war far more generous than unconditional surrender.

Ultra was even more alarming in what it revealed about Japanese knowledge of American military plans. Intercepts demonstrated that the Japanese had correctly anticipated precisely where U.S. forces intended to land on Southern Kyushu in November 1945 (Operation Olympic). American planning for the Kyushu assault reflected adherence to the military rule of thumb that the attacker should outnumber the defender at least three to one to assure success at a reasonable cost. American estimates projected that on the date of the landings, the Japanese would have only three of their six field divisions on all of Kyushu in the southern target area where nine American divisions would push ashore. The estimates allowed that the Japanese would possess just 2,500 to 3,000 planes total throughout Japan to face Olympic. American aerial strength would be over four times greater.

From mid-July onwards, Ultra intercepts exposed a huge military buildup on Kyushu. Japanese ground forces exceeded prior estimates by a factor of four. Instead of 3 Japanese field divisions deployed in southern Kyushu to meet the 9 U.S. divisions, there were 10 Imperial Army divisions plus additional brigades. Japanese air forces exceeded prior estimates by a factor of two to four. Instead of 2,500 to 3,000 Japanese aircraft, estimates varied between about 6,000 and 10,000. One intelligence officer commented that the Japanese defenses threatened “to grow to [the] point where we attack on a ratio of one (1) to one (1) which is not the recipe for victory.”

Concurrent with the publication of the radio intelligence material, additional papers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been released in the last decade. From these, it is clear that there was no true consensus among the Joint Chiefs of Staff about an invasion of Japan. The Army, led by General George C. Marshall, believed that the critical factor in achieving American war aims was time. Thus, Marshall and the Army advocated an invasion of the Home Islands as the fastest way to end the war. But the long-held Navy view was that the critical factor in achieving American war aims was casualties. The Navy was convinced that an invasion would be far too costly to sustain the support of the American people, and hence believed that blockade and bombardment were the sound course.

The picture becomes even more complex than previously understood because it emerged that the Navy chose to postpone a final showdown over these two strategies. The commander in chief of the U.S. fleet, Admiral Ernest King, informed his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 1945 that he did not agree that Japan should be invaded. He concurred only that the Joint Chiefs must issue an invasion order immediately to create that option for the fall. But King predicted that the Joint Chiefs would revisit the issue of whether an invasion was wise in August or September. Meanwhile, two months of horrendous fighting ashore on Okinawa under skies filled with kamikazes convinced the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester Nimitz, that he should withdraw his prior support for at least the invasion of Kyushu. Nimitz informed King of this change in his views in strict confidence. …

A NY Post OpEd has more.

… Sadly, it is the myths about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that dominate the White House’s moral calculus, not the actual facts.

Those myths are that the dropping of the bomb on Japan was an overt act of racism by an American government that saw the Asians who’d be killed as inferior and therefore expendable; and that in building the atomic bomb, America created a weapon so terrible and barbaric that its presence poses a constant threat to civilization and the planet — which is why nuclear disarmament must be not only a strategic, but a moral imperative.

The first myth distorts historical truth. The second may doom us to a permanently perilous world. Both also ignore certain ineluctable facts.

First, the Manhattan Project developed the atomic bomb for use on the Germans, not the Japanese. It was pure accident that the Third Reich collapsed before the bomb could be dropped in Europe, and became available to use on Japan instead.

Second, the number of Japanese who died in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings — some 300,000 in all — would have been dwarfed by the 2 million or so who’d have perished in a full-scale invasion of Japan — along with the 1 million Americans GIs, Marines, sailors and airmen whom US military planners calculated would also be killed or wounded in that assault. …

A lot of ink has been spilled claiming American companies are swimming in cash. Market Watch says that is a canard, and that we must look at balance sheets to see what really is happening.

… American companies are not in robust financial shape. Federal Reserve data show that their debts have been rising, not falling. By some measures, they are now more leveraged than at any time since the Great Depression.

You’d think someone might have noticed something amiss. After all, we were simultaneously being told that companies (a) had more money than they know what to do with; (b) had even more money coming in due to a surge in profits; yet (c) they have been out in the bond market borrowing as fast as they can.

Does that sound a little odd to you?

A look at the facts shows that companies only have “record amounts of cash” in the way that Subprime Suzy was flush with cash after that big refi back in 2005. So long as you don’t look at the liabilities, the picture looks great. Hey, why not buy a Jacuzzi?

According to the Federal Reserve, nonfinancial firms borrowed another $289 billion in the first quarter, taking their total domestic debts to $7.2 trillion, the highest level ever. That’s up by $1.1 trillion since the first quarter of 2007; it’s twice the level seen in the late 1990s. …

An economist drills down into the last employment report for The Daily Beast.

… With the end of the inventory cycle, a huge wave of state and local cutbacks, and further declines in house prices on the way, the situation looks bleak for the second half of 2010. Temporary employment is falling rapidly, suggesting weaker job growth ahead.

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The State Department appears to be another government department that selectively enforces laws and policies based on the whims of government employees’ opinions. Andy McCarthy thinks it is time for State to call a spade a spade, and name the Taliban as a terrorist organization

…Yesterday, after three months of delay, the State Department finally issued its congressionally mandated annual terrorism report. It shows that the United States has not even designated the Taliban as a terrorist organization — not in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan. Similarly, the government has also failed to designate both the Haqqani Network and HIG. (Hekmatyar himself, in his individual capacity, has been designated as a “global terrorist” since 2003.)

The full list of designated terrorist organizations is here. The designation is very important, and not just because it stands as a formal declaration by our government. Providing material support to an organization once it has been designated a serious federal crime — and prosecution for it helps us starve terror organizations of resources, making it harder for those organizations to attack our country. Yet, as you can see, the State Department does not list the Taliban organizations with which we are at war, even though it continues to list the Basques, the Tamil Tigers, Kahane Chai (an Israeli group that disbanded about 16 years ago), a renegade wing of the Irish Republican Army, and several other groups that have nothing to do with anti-American terrorism. …

…Why has our government failed to declare that the Taliban branches, the Haqqani Network, and HIG are both terrorist organizations and our enemies in the war? If they are sinister enough for us to commit our troops to fight them, shouldn’t we be taking every legal step to support that effort?

Ed Morrissey comments on what the Obami will do next in their failed attempts to mandate economic growth.

…The departure of Christine Romer puts Larry Summers and Tim Geithner in the driver’s seat for economic policy — and Kudlow says that’s bad news indeed.  Geithner’s already on record saying that extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for wealthier earners will put the recovery in peril, when the evidence above shows that Obama needs investors to put their cash into the private sector instead of having the government seize it.  Kudlow calls it Geithner’s war against investment, and with Romer out of the way, he expects it to escalate.

This explains James Pethokoukis’ warning about the rumored write-off at Fannie for underwater mortgages.  That will either drop a bomb on Wall Street or on the national debt, which has already hit the crisis stage.  Kudlow hears the same rumors (although it’s not clear whether he heard them from Pethokoukis’ column), and more.  The Fed will extend its lax monetary policy even further at its meeting this month and may announce further expansion of the money supply, a move that will further depress an already sinking dollar.  It’s a kitchen-sink, flailing approach to command-economy policies that clearly have failed to produce a real recovery and instead have delivered exactly what the same kind of approach delivered the last time it was tried in the 1970s: stagnation. …

Michael Barone thinks that Republicans simply being anti-Obama is just as vacuous as Obama’s rigid anti-Bush stance.

…Some young House Republicans have put out a call for voters to e-mail their ideas. And House Republican leaders say they’ll put together something in the nature of a 1994-style Contract With America over the August recess. …

…There are some obvious targets for Republicans if they win big this year. Democrats have jacked up domestic spending sharply; some reversal should be possible. The many glitches in Obamacare, some apparent now and others as yet undiscovered, could form a basis for derailment if not repeal.

Giveaways to labor unions, like the $26 billion package for the teacher unions which the House is to be summoned back from its recess to pass, presumably will be off the table.

Larger issues need to be addressed. We’re overdue for a simplifying tax reform. And there is the looming crisis in entitlements –Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. …

Along the same lines, Republicans need to come up with practical ways of dealing with problems. Peter Wehner once again voices criticism over altering the 14th amendment.

…There is plenty policymakers can do to curb illegal immigration (including securing the southern border, toughening enforcement policies, and expediting the legal process to cut the average deportation time) and improve our overall approach to immigration (including narrowing the scope of the family-reunification privilege to the nuclear family, adjusting upward our quotas for high-skilled labor, and making assimilation a central national priority). Pushing for altering the 14th amendment, though, is worse than unhelpful; it is substantively unwise and politically harmful.

Republicans are practicing the politics of symbolism in the worst way possible. They are embracing a policy that doesn’t have any realistic chance of becoming law, that will be unnecessarily divisive and inflammatory, and that, in the long term, will be politically counterproductive. …

Perhaps one issue that Republicans can address is banning government employee unions, which have dramatically increased the fiscal problems that so many local and state governments are facing. In the NY Daily News, Eileen Norcross and Todd Zywicki look at the problem. Are you willing to pay for a bail out of New York City so thousands of employees can collect their six-figure-per-year pensions?

…But loopholes and gamesmanship aren’t the only reason why public pension systems nationwide face massive funding shortfalls. They are the result of a perfect storm of flawed accounting, which fueled unrealistic employee demands that were then underfunded by politicians. In plans across the country, during booming years of the late 1990s, many workers were promised retirement payouts that were “too good to be true” and, thus, impossible to make good on.

…Professor Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University projects that even if public sector plans earn 8% on their investments, four states – Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Indiana – will run out of assets to pay retirees by the end of the decade. States and local governments will soon find themselves up against a painful tradeoff: between closing schools and libraries and cutting other essential services or paying inflated pensions to 50-year-old retirees.

No one begrudges a secure retirement for police officers, firefighters and other public servants. But unless states act now by closing insolvent plans to new hires and reducing the rate of benefit accrual for current employees, they won’t be able shore up enough to guarantee at least some of what’s been promised.

For now, unions have been unyielding to proposals that alter pension formulas for current workers. When Colorado froze the Cost of Living Adjustment in the state’s pension formula, the union sued, noting the move erodes retirees’ purchasing power.

That’s one reason why most pension reforms affect benefits only for new hires, which won’t make a real difference in the tab for many years. Unions instead seem to prefer that states go bankrupt to pay the full bill. All while workers in the private sector are confronting their own retirement losses, high unemployment, and the certainty of higher future taxes, leaving everyone who isn’t in a public sector plan with a much bleaker future to look forward to. …

The Streetwise Professor comments on the recent Russian ban on exporting wheat.

Russia is going to ban wheat exports, and is “coordinating” with the members of its “Customs Union,” Kazakhstan and Belarus, to do the same.  This ban has caused a worldwide spike in wheat prices… Moreover, the cancellation is undermining Russia’s reputation (yeah, I know) as a reliable trading partner.

Cargill makes the point that Adam Smith made in the Wealth of Nations in the chapter “A Digression on the Corn Trade:”

‘Cargill, the world’s biggest trader of agricultural commodities, criticised Moscow’s move. “Such trade barriers further distort wheat markets by making it harder for supplies to move from areas of surplus to areas of deficit, and by preventing price signals from reaching wheat farmers,” it said.’

…Russian exporters argue that the precipitous announcement will make it harder for Russia to export going forward…

The Streetwise Professor explains some of the economics behind his previous comments.

…So this isn’t a Russia thing or a Putin thing.  It is an economics thing.  Restricting trade is a bad idea.  And one of the effects of an embargo is that it harms the commercial reputation of the country imposing the embargo.  Indeed, imposing embargoes at exactly the time when importing nations are most in need of the commodity is particularly damaging; fair weather suppliers, like fair weather friends, are not friends at all.  Once you get that rap, people will find ways to reduce their reliance on you, which will have long term consequences.

And given Russia’s track record on trade and embargoes, it has precious little reputational capital to draw upon in such circumstances.  It has even less now.  It wants to build up its ag export business in a big way.  It just made that a whole lot harder.  More Putinist short-termism that will impose long term damage on the Russian economy. …

Jonah Goldberg says the government is forcing poor people to helping rich people buy green cars.

…Because the Volt’s sticker price might be too high for even that crowd, the government is offering a federal subsidy of up to $7,500 (Californians have a state subsidy, too), which means that working-class people will be helping to pay for playthings for upper-income people.

“Like the EV1 that GM tried to peddle in the California market,” Kenneth Green, an environmental scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, says, “the Volt is a vanity car for the well-off that will be subsidized by less well-off taxpayers at all stages, from R&D to sales and to the construction of charging stations.”

Indeed, the Volt’s price is $41,000, but the cost is much higher. “Government Motors” is already selling the car at a loss. According to the blogger Doctor Zero, if you apply the subsidies that have gone directly into the car to just the first 10,000 vehicles, the cost is more like $81,000 per car. …

…If the government weren’t taking taxpayer money and spending it on toys for upscale urban liberals (Obama’s strongest base of support outside of black voters and labor unions), there’d be no reason to care about the Volt. If rich people want to be “early adopters” and buy expensive gadgets that help them preen the plumage of their political sanctimony, that’s great. It’s not so great when the government gets involved in wealth redistribution, and it’s outrageous when it involves redistributing wealth upwards.

John Hinderaker of Power Line figures out Michelle’s excellent adventure.

… I think the Obamas’ tone-deafness, which was on exhibit long before Michelle’s Spanish vacation, more likely results from their inexperience and the fact that if you are a significant figure in Democratic Party politics, you spend a great deal of time with rich people. That can skew one’s perspective.

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In the WSJ, Elliot Abrams looks at a number of players in the Middle East, and the current issues facing them. Abrams discusses the irony of reluctant understandings forming between Israel and some Arab states as the Iranian nuclear threat grows.

…And two weeks ago, the Israeli press carried reports of a visit to Saudi Arabia by Gen. Meir Dagan, chief of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency; Gen. Dagan is the point man on Iran for the Israeli government. This follows stories in the Times of London two months ago claiming that the Saudis would suspend their air defense operations to permit Israeli fighter planes to cross Saudi air space en route to an attack on Iran. …

…The Egyptian regime feels no love for the Israelis, but there is significant security cooperation between the two countries; Egypt’s rulers see the Shia in Iran, not the Jewish state, as the more dangerous threat to Arab power in the region. Egypt’s decisions in late July to bar an Iranian Red Crescent ship carrying aid to Gaza from entering the Suez Canal and to prevent four Iranian parliamentarians from crossing the border into Gaza are the most recent proof of this Egyptian attitude. …

…The Gulf regimes have long relied on American protection, and the U.S. maintains large bases in the UAE, Bahrain (the Fifth fleet’s headquarters), Qatar and Kuwait. For these regimes and for the Saudis, Iran is a constant threat and the issue of the day is who will be, to use the old British phrase, “top country” in the region. Repeated American offers to negotiate with Iran, and statements from Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates respectively that an attack on Iran would be “incredibly destabilizing” or “disastrous” do not reassure them. They want Iran stopped. They are not sure the need to do that is understood as well in Washington as it is in Jerusalem—and at Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv. …

Ed Morrissey comments on Christina Romer’s departure.

…Romer’s legacy will probably mostly focus on the Porkulus chart that argued for a $775 billion stimulus package and predicted it would hold the unemployment rate at 8% or below. …

…Romer also played a big role in botching the future deficits projection last year, missing the mark by $2 trillion.  King Banaian showed the arbitrary (and unsupportable) assumptions that went into Romer’s initial figures, and the lame excuses that followed their exposure.  Romer made a career in this administration of making unsupportable claims and bad bets, and she should have resigned a year ago over that amateurish episode.

That makes two key members of Obama’s economic team to depart this summer.  Peter Orszag, the budget director who couldn’t spot Romer’s $2 trillion error and who presided over the biggest deficit expansion in modern history, hit the road for family obligations earlier.  With approval ratings on the economy for Obama and Democrats crashing while unemployment skyrockets, it looks as though the White House wants to clean house and argue for a fresh start just before the midterms.  Until that “fresh start” begins to reduce spending, taxes, and regulatory burdens, though, the composition of Obama’s economic team isn’t going to make any difference at all.

Ed Morrissey also interprets some recent economic statistics for us.

…They also forget the point about job losses being cumulative, as they almost always do, by attempting to cheer people up about layoffs and terminations having “moderated significantly”:

Despite the tepid private sector jobs growth, the pace of layoffs has moderated significantly from the first quarter of last year, when employers were culling an average of 752,000 jobs a month.

Well, yeah — because those jobs are still lost.  No one thought that pace would continue forever, regardless of the economic policies of the Democrats.  The point is that a year later, we should be looking at significant gains in recovering those jobs, not tooting horns because the slope of the decline has shallowed out.

Christopher Hitchens shares his thoughts on the discovery and diagnosis of his cancer.

…Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth. The word “metastasized” was the one in the report that first caught my eye, and ear. The alien had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located—had been located for quite some time—in my esophagus. My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not? …

Karl Rove says there’s good news in many gubernatorial elections, for GOP candidates and for the economy if the GOP works to reign in government.

…The GOP’s edge in statehouse contests could have major ramifications for a long time to come, including next year’s redistricting of the House of Representatives. The more GOP governors, the stronger Republican dominance of the process will be. Eighteen of the 21 states that could add or lose congressional seats have governors’ races this fall. There also will be a lot more Republican legislators after November to help draw redistricting lines for the coming decade.

Republicans are poised to elect a new generation of leaders. After this fall’s election, the GOP could have two Indian-American, two Hispanic, and as many as seven women governors. This would provide powerful evidence of the GOP’s diversity and help refurbish the party’s image.

…Already, the GOP victors in last year’s gubernatorial contests are providing powerful contrasts to Mr. Obama’s policies. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell erased his state’s nearly $2 billion deficit without raising taxes. Facing a $13 billion shortfall, a hostile Democratic legislature and more than $7 million in negative ads launched against him by labor unions, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie nonetheless balanced the budget while cutting taxes. …

In Forbes, Reihan Salam reports on the success of Amazon’s Kindle, and where new technologies may lead society.

In the 33 months since the launch of Amazon’s Kindle platform, sales of Kindle e-books have surpassed sales of hardcover books. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicts that e-book sales will surpass paperback sales within the next 12 months, and combined hardcover and paperback sales soon after that. This despite the fact that the 600,000 titles in the Kindle bookstore represents only a fraction of Amazon’s inventory.

That the success of the Kindle is good news for Amazon should go without saying. But it represents a remarkable environmental advance as well. The publishing industry in the U.S. felled roughly 125 million trees and generated vast amounts of wastewater. And, of course, physical books have to be transported by trucks, which generate carbon emissions, exacerbate congestion, increase traffic fatalities and cause wear-and-tear on already overburdened roads. One assumes that Bezos didn’t have the environment foremost in mind when he pushed the Kindle concept forward, yet he’s arguably done more to fight climate change by threatening hardcovers and paperbacks with extinction than any number of environmental activists. …

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Charles Krauthammer makes excellent points about the consent of the governed and separation of powers. And he gives examples of how disregard for these constitutional principles leads to government agencies governing citizens as they choose, rather than enforcing existing law. This disregard of constitutional principles also produces a menacing executive branch, where the Bully-In-Chief will get his way through subtle threat of how the government will make life difficult for those who do not bow to his will.

…How did we get here? I blame Henry Paulson. (Such a versatile sentence.) The gold standard of executive overreach was achieved the day he summoned the heads of the country’s nine largest banks and informed them that henceforth the federal government was their business partner. The banks were under no legal obligation to obey. But they know the capacity of the federal government, when crossed, to cause you trouble, endless trouble. They complied.

So did BP when the president summoned its top executives to the White House to demand a $20 billion federally administered escrow fund for damages. Existing law capped damages at $75 million. BP, like the banks, understood the power of the U.S. government. Twenty billion it was.

Again, you can be pleased with the result (I was) and still be troubled by how we got there. Everyone wants energy in the executive (as Alexander Hamilton called it). But not lawlessness. In the modern welfare state, government has the power to regulate your life. That’s bad enough. But at least there is one restraint on this bloated power: the separation of powers. Such constraints on your life must first be approved by both houses of Congress.

That’s called the consent of the governed. The constitutional order is meant to subject you to the will of the people’s representatives, not to the whim of a chief executive or the imagination of a loophole-seeking bureaucrat.

The Obami are considering mortgage debt forgiveness to improve the Dems political situation, writes the Investor’s Business Daily editors, instead of looking at measures that would help all Americans. Perhaps someone should remind the creeps that a similar initiative started the Tea Party.

It appears that Democrats will receive a severe beating in the fall elections. What can save them? How about the administration wiping out large swaths of debt for underwater mortgage holders?

James Pethokoukis, a Reuters columnist who once wrote for IBD, reported Thursday that the White House might have an August Surprise in the works. …

…It would be irresponsible for the administration to order the forgiveness of so much debt. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which guarantee more than $5 trillion in mortgages, or roughly half the U.S. total, are now wards of the federal government. They’ve needed $145 billion from Washington just to keep their heads above water.

Last year, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that “The operations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac added $291 billion to CBO’s August 2009 baseline estimate of the federal deficit for fiscal year 2009 and $99 billion to the total deficit projected for the 2010—2019 period.”

Clearly, writing off parts of mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will put an even greater burden on taxpayers who have helped keep the sick enterprises alive. …

In Foreign Policy, Peter Feaver comments on the classless administration Iraq policy

President Obama’s speech on Iraq was a disappointment. Not a surprise, but a disappointment.

It was disappointing because it was yet another missed opportunity. He could have shown real statesmanship by acknowledging he was wrong about the surge. He could have reached across the aisle and credited Republicans who backed the policy he vigorously opposed and tried to thwart, a policy that has made it possible (but by no means certain) to hope for a responsible end to the Iraq war. He could have told the truth about his Iraq strategy, that what he has pursued thus far has not been what he was arguing for in the campaign — that would have involved the departure of all U.S. troops by mid 2008 — but rather he has followed, in a more or less desultory fashion, a script written in the status of forces agreement negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki.

Instead of giving such a speech, Obama gave a campaign address trying to claim credit for anything that is going well in Iraq and trying to avoid blame for anything that is going poorly. That may be shrewd campaign politics, but it is not the statesmanship the occasion warranted. The commander-in-chief missed an opportunity, and I worry that it will come back to haunt us. …

Ralph Peters has a perceptive piece in the NY Post about Obama’s neglect of Iraq.

…Ignoring his own opposition to the liberation of Iraq, supporting our troops and the surge, Obama spoke as if all’s well in Baghdad — thanks to him.

As part of his weird victory lap, the president rightfully praised the way “our troops adapted and adjusted” to the insurgency in Iraq, then stressed that 90,000 service members have come home during his administration. …

…While that country has passed its military crisis, it’s now in political turmoil — from which our government has utterly disengaged. We won that war, but we still can lose the peace. Obama shunned the fact that, almost half a year after its last national election, Iraq doesn’t have a new government. Determined to abandon “Bush’s war,” Obama’s been AWOL in Baghdad.

His neglect may prove disastrous. And the saddest aspect is that the Iraqis wanted us to step in and act as referees, to press them to get past their political differences.

The Iraqi elections were so close that both main camps claimed victory. In the macho atmosphere of Iraq, neither side could back down or compromise after that without an excuse (“Those mean Americans made me do it!”). Our essential and dirt-cheap role would have been to hand the posturing parties a fig leaf. …

Roger Simon comments on Michelle Obama’s lavish vacation outside the US.

Several weeks ago I wrote I thought Barack Obama didn’t really want to be president. The post generated a fair amount of discussion, pro and con.

Michelle’s $375,000 Spanish vacation — with the Daily Mail dubbing her a “modern-day Marie Antoinette” — is further proof of my thesis. What man who wanted to be re-elected (or see his party do well in November) would let his wife go off on such an “excellent adventure” in these economic times? Of course no one denies the right of people to have vacations – I’m coming to the end of one myself on my beloved Bainbridge Island — but closing Mediterranean beaches while booking 60-plus rooms in a five star Marbella hotel for her entourage? It is beyond tone deaf, perhaps to the level of subconscious (or even deliberate) self-sabotage. …

David Harsanyi has an unusual view on the gay marriage debate.

In the 1500s, a pestering theologian instituted something called the Marriage Ordinance in Geneva, which made “state registration and church consecration” a dual requirement of matrimony.

We have yet to get over this mistake. But isn’t it about time we freed marriage from the state?

Imagine if government had no interest in the definition of marriage. Individuals could commit to each other, head to the local priest or rabbi or shaman — or no one at all — and enter into contractual agreements, call their blissful union whatever they felt it should be called and go about the business of their lives. …

NPR posted a transcript of Talk of the Nation featuring an interview with Andrew Hacker, author of Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It. We had a WSJ review of this last Tuesday.

…COX: We also have another couple of emails. They’re really coming in. People are very interested in this topic. This comes from Keith… in Boston, Massachusetts. Keith writes: Higher ed is not broken, but it is in trouble because it attempts to follow a for-profit business model. It has become unaffordable, because starting with the Reagan administration the federal government has not supported education. Is Keith right or wrong?

Prof. HACKER: He’s right and wrong. Currently, as you indicated at the outset, Tony, at a private college, its going to cost you really up toward $50,000 a year. Imagine that, $50,000 a year. That’s over what the typical American worker makes. Now, why is that? Its because colleges know they can keep raising their prices as they’ve been doing, well ahead of inflation, and the students will come and take out loans. In other words, our colleges are being really built on the indebtedness that young people, starting at the age of 18, are signing papers that they are going to live with until they’re 38. We regard this as totally immoral. …

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Roger Simon wonders if the GOP is really the party of the rich.

… We live in an era — the worst economically since the Depression — when the daughter of the first couple of the Democratic Party has a multi-million dollar, Marie Antoinette-style wedding with port-a-potties almost as luxurious as a toilette in Baden Baden; its self-proclaimed environmental leader, the first global warming billionaire, sprouts “green” McMansions from Nashville to Montecito; and its already multi-billionaire senator from Massachusetts moors his yacht in another state to escape taxes we hoi polloi could only dream of paying. …

Jennifer Rubin thinks the Clintons are looking good – comparatively speaking.

… In polarized political times and with growing frustration with the Obama administration (liberals dismayed, conservatives gloating), there is something refreshing — and unifying – about the Clinton-watching these days. We can all agree that Clinton was/is a badly flawed character whose presidency fell victim to his own excesses and lack of discipline. And many Americans from the vantage point of the Obama era view the Clinton presidency (like that of George W. Bush’s) much more favorably. Frankly, Obama’s greatest accomplishment to date may be to improve his predecessors’ images and forge a new not-Obama coalition. Not exactly what he had in mind, I grant you.

Richard Epstein discourses on the four rotten policy planks of this administration.

Two recent developments, one economic and the other political, should raise no eyebrows. The first is the somber economic news that the U.S.’s halting recovery is already losing steam, without regaining the levels of production and employment that the economy had more two years ago. As against historical averages, the nation faces a double whammy: a later start and a weaker boost. The second point is not unrelated to the first: President Obama has decided not to go on the hustings to campaign for the re-election of members of the House and Senate. First-term House Democrats, in particular, know that a weak president will only remind the electorate that not all economic problems can be laid at the feet of the Republicans.

This sorry state should come as no surprise given that four weak planks are sufficient to sink the ship. …

Anne Applebaum reminds us of the free-spending GOP.

… Here is a more accurate assessment: “President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ.” I didn’t write that; the astute libertarian economist Veronique de Rugy did. She also points out that during his eight years in office, Bush’s “anti-government” Republican administration increased the federal budget by an extraordinary 104 percent. By comparison, the increase under President Bill Clinton’s watch was a relatively measly 11 percent (a rate, I might add, lower than Ronald Reagan’s). In his last term in office, Bush increased discretionary spending—that means non-Medicare, non-Social Security—by 48.6 percent. In his final year in office, fiscal year 2009, he spent more than $32,000 per American, up from $17,216.68 in fiscal year 2001.

But Bush is not the only culprit. After all, the federal government usually spends money in response to state demands. Look, for example, at the demands made by Alaska, a state that produces a disproportionate quantity of anti-government rhetoric, which has had Republican governors since 2002, and which has a congressional delegation dominated by Republicans. Nevertheless, for the last decade, Alaska has been among the top three largest state recipients of federal funding, per capita. Usually, Alaska is far ahead—sometimes three times as far ahead—of most other states in the union.

Largely, this is because of one famous Alaskan, Sen. Ted Stevens—a Republican—who devoted himself to securing federal funding for his state during more than four decades in the Senate. Not only were his efforts extremely popular among his Republican constituents—he was re-elected multiple times—they won him many, many imitators. Timothy Noah has pointed out that Sarah Palin, when mayor of Wasilla, hired Stevens’ former chief of staff as a Washington lobbyist. As a result, the 6,700 inhabitants of Wasilla enjoyed $27 million in federal earmarks over a four-year period. …

Corner Post with good news from Michigan’s primary vote.

… Not even Detroit royalty was spared. The self-described Kennedys of Detroit lost their final officeholder — U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick — as voters decided that even the mother of convicted ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was too many Kilpatricks on the public payroll.

Michigan’s roar against the political class bodes well for November. Republicans are in the catbird’s seat to take back two, perhaps three, congressional districts as well as a swing-state governor’s mansion.

Investor’s Business Daily editors note how the bureaucracy will get amnesty by the back-door.

Polls show Democrats have decisively lost the debate over granting amnesty to illegals. But has that stopped them? Hardly. Using the federal bureaucracy as their agent, they plan to do it anyway.

This is what happens when big government becomes so powerful that those who run it feel they can do whatever they want — no matter what the Constitution allows or the people prefer.

Americans strongly oppose amnesty for those here illegally. Democrats have been frightened away from trying to pass an amnesty bill because they’re terrified of the political consequences.

But as the Associated Press reports, that doesn’t mean amnesty is dead. Far from it. Indeed, the White House and Congress have apparently decided on a policy of “backdoor amnesty” — giving the U.S.’ immigration bureaucracy the go-ahead to enforce an amnesty law that has never been passed. …

Robert Samuelson adds his thoughts to the good news about shale gas.

You probably have never heard of oilman George Mitchell, but more than anyone else, he has changed the global energy outlook. In 1981, Mitchell’s small petroleum company faced dwindling natural gas reserves. He proposed a radical idea: drill deeper in the company’s Texas fields to reach gas-bearing shale rock more than a mile down. Because the gas was tightly packed, most engineers believed it was too costly to extract profitably. But after nearly two decades of trying, Mitchell proved doubters wrong. The result: The world has far more available natural gas than anyone suspected.

The BP oil spill cast a cloud over almost all energy news. Well, shale gas is good news. Here’s why.

Until recently, scarce U.S. natural gas reserves suggested increasing dependence on expensive foreign supplies of liquefied natural gas. No more. Also, natural gas emits about 50 percent less carbon dioxide — the major greenhouse gas — than coal. Substituting gas for coal in electricity plants could temper emissions. Finally, shale gas in Europe and Asia has huge geopolitical implications. It could reduce dependence on Russian natural gas and frustrate any gas cartel mimicking OPEC. …

Jonah Goldberg, writing for USA Today, points out why Haiti’s poverty will probably always be with us.

A recent episode of NPR’s This American Life (quite possibly the best reportorial journalistic enterprise going today — an admission that might cost me my right-wing decoder ring) focused on the plight of Haiti. The island nation was a basket case long before last January’s horrific earthquake. Indeed, despite the fact that the country hosts some 10,000 aid groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), it has gotten worse over the past half-century. Haitians on average make half as much as they did 50 years ago. Despite the best of intentions, aid agencies simply haven’t made the country better.

Why?

The usual answer from the left is a long indictment of America and the West’s legacy of racism, imperialism and slavery. But even if you concede all of that, it won’t get you very far in explaining why Haiti has only gotten worse as that legacy has faded further into the past and the West has grown in generosity. (Roughly half of all American households donated to earthquake relief.)

This American Life, hardly a capitalist hotbed, has a more constructive answer: Haiti’s problems in large part boil down to a culture of poverty. Haitians do not lack the desire to make their lives better, nor do they reject hard work. But what they sorely lack is a legal, social and intellectual culture that favors economic growth and entrepreneurialism. …

Jennifer Rubin suggests a Hirohito monument at Pearl Harbor.

The controversy over the mosque — all fifteen stories of it– planned for Ground Zero is one of those issues that divide ordinary Americans from elites. It is a debate that convinces average Americans that the governing and media elites are not cut from the same cloth as they. In fact, it strikes many as evidence that our “leaders” are stricken with a sort of political and cultural insanity, an obtuseness that defies explanation. …

Rubin posts that even Juan Williams had a moment of sanity.

On Fox News Sunday, the panelists discussed the Ground Zero mosque. Ceci Connolly supplied the standard liberal line: freedom of religion requires that we allow the mosque to be constructed on the site where the ashes of 3,000 Americans blew through the air like confetti. Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney took the opposite view; Cheney was most concerned about the shadowy funding and the imam’s connection to jihadists (”the same groups that attacked us on 9-11?), while Kristol urged that out of “decency and propriety,” we shouldn’t allow a mosque to “tower over” Ground Zero.

The real surprise in the discussion was Juan Williams, who one expected to take Connolly’s side. Williams, however, didn’t parrot the left’s “tolerance” line. Instead, like Cheney, he criticized the lack of “transparency” in funding. But he did not stop there. He called building the mosque a “thumb in the eye” of those who lost their lives and suffered trauma. He concluded that, contrary to the imam’s claimed intention, the construction is “not promoting dialogue or understanding; in fact it is polarizing.” …

Shorts from National Review.

The chilly little welfare state to our north, Canada, is running relatively tiny deficits, having engaged only in relatively sober stimulus measures. To no one’s great surprise, Canada’s freedom from heavy government debt and its comparatively liberal economic environment (the Heritage Foundation now ranks its economy as more free than that of the United States) have enabled a much stronger recovery — to the extent that Canada, which has about one-tenth as many people as the United States, added 10,000 more jobs in June: 93,200 to our 83,000. Canada has recovered 97 percent of the jobs lost in the recent economic turmoil. Say what you like about aping the European welfare states, the Canadians do a better job of it than do Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.

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Christopher Hitchens comments on Hugo Chávez’s sanity after visiting with the dictator.

Recent accounts of Hugo Chávez’s politicized necrophilia may seem almost too lurid to believe, but I can testify from personal experience that they may well be an understatement. In the early hours of July 16—just at the midnight hour, to be precise—Venezuela’s capo officiated at a grisly ceremony. This involved the exhumation of the mortal remains of Simón Bolívar, leader of Latin America’s rebellion against Spain, who died in 1830. According to a vividly written article by Thor Halvorssen in the July 25 Washington Post, the skeleton was picked apart—even as Chávez tweeted the proceedings for his audience—and some teeth and bone fragments were taken away for testing. The residual pieces were placed in a coffin stamped with the Chávez government’s seal. In one of the rather free-associating speeches for which he has become celebrated, Chávez appealed to Jesus Christ to restage the raising of Lazarus and reanimate Bolívar’s constituent parts. He went on:

‘I had some doubts, but after seeing his remains, my heart said, “Yes, it is me.” Father, is that you, or who are you? The answer: “It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.” ‘ …

…Many people laughed when Chávez appeared at the podium of the United Nations in September 2006 and declared that he smelled sulfur from the devil himself because of the presence of George W. Bush. But the evidence is that he does have an idiotic weakness for spells and incantations, as well as many of the symptoms of paranoia and megalomania. …

In the National Review, Daniel Foster gives us details on Chris Christie’s battles in New Jersey.

It was supposed to have been the biggest fight of Chris Christie’s young administration: a May showdown over what Democrats in Trenton were calling the “millionaires’ tax,” designed, like each of the 115 statewide tax increases of the last decade, to paper over a small part of a yawning structural deficit by soaking the rich, one last time. Never mind that half the filings and a third of the revenue from the tax were to come from New Jersey’s business community, already battered by a perfect storm of overtaxation, capital flight, and recession. The Democrats were loaded for bear, and had the legislative majorities in place to pass the measure, having spent all winter threatening a government shutdown should Christie use his veto pen.

Democratic senate president Stephen Sweeney had even admonished, in a turn of phrase eminently Trentonian in its sheer backwardness, that “to give up $1 billion to the wealthy during this crisis is just wrong.” He promised that the millionaires’ tax was where the Democrats would “make our stand.”

The tax passed on party-line votes in the assembly and senate on May 20. Sweeney then certified the bill and walked it across the statehouse to Christie’s office, where the governor — who had vowed to balance the budget without raising taxes, and who’d developed a bewildering habit of keeping his promises — vetoed it. The whole thing took about two minutes.

“We’ll be back, governor,” Sweeney told Christie on being dispatched with the dead letter.

“All right, we’ll see,” came the reply.

And just like that, the biggest obstacle standing between Christie and the realization of his sea-changing, fiscally conservative first-year agenda was gone.

“We have not found our footing,” Democratic state senator Loretta Weinberg later said, still reeling from the decisive defeat. “I think a lot of people underestimated Chris Christie.”…

… The New Jersey that Chris Christie inherited was one that the Mercatus Center at George Mason University had ranked 46th in the Union on its economic-freedom index, and one whose business-tax climate the Tax Foundation had called the worst in the nation. Its narrow tax base had been in a death spiral for years: High-tech, high-paying jobs were fleeing — one Boston College study estimated $70 billion in wealth had left between 2004 and 2008 alone — and being replaced by low-wage, low-tech ones. For decades Trenton had jacked up taxes on the wealth that remained — inspiring new rounds of capital flight — and relied on weak budgetary rules and accounting tricks to kick growing shortfalls down the road. As a July 2009 study by Mercatus’s Eileen Norcross and Frederic Sautet concluded,

“the government of New Jersey has resorted to fiscal evasion — avoiding the rules meant to constrain spending — and has sustained spending growth through fiscal illusion, obscuring the full costs of policies by relying on intergovernmental aid and debt to achieve the current level of spending. The state has long emphasized current spending at the expense of higher taxes for future taxpayers. The costs of this approach are now coming due.”

Come due they had for Christie, who after less than a day on the job was being advised to borrow his way out of crisis. What he did instead set the tone for everything that followed. …

In the WaPo, Tom Shales pans Christiane Amanpour’s Sunday morning debut.

…It’s not that Amanpour seemed personally uncomfortable or constrained in her weekend debut — opening night was Sunday morning — but rather that she proved that she’s miscast for the role, her highly touted global orientation coming across as inappropriate and contrived on a broadcast that for three decades has dealt primarily with domestic politics, policies and culture.

…Amanpour announced her intention to “open a window on the world” now that she runs “This Week,” but the show was hardly a haven for isolationists, and refashioning it to take advantage of Amanpour’s specialty could, in a word, ruin it.

Exhibit A: During the roundtable portion of the show — from the beginning, “This Week’s” centerpiece and best feature — Amanpour didn’t stick to discussing news of the week with the show’s estimable, exceptional panelists — among them George F. Will and Donna Brazile — but instead brought in a foreign journalist seen earlier in the program, Ahmed Rashid (momentarily stationed in Madrid), for his views via satellite. It was awkward in form and proved negligible in content.

In fact, it became ludicrous when, near the end of the segment, the U.S. economy was discussed and Amanpour called upon Rashid, the Taliban expert, again even though he seemed of dubious relevance and authority to the topic at hand.  …

And we have NRO shorts. Here are two:

We didn’t have to wait long to see the first unintended consequence of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Democrats’ financial-regulation overhaul. Due to a last-minute change in the laws governing legal liability for the ratings agencies, bond raters such as Moody’s and Fitch asked bond issuers not to use their ratings until they got a “better understanding” of their legal exposure. This shut down the bond markets until the SEC was forced to temporarily suspend requirements that all bond offerings come packaged with credit ratings. “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works,” Sen. Chris Dodd famously said of the bill that bears his name. That is one thing he got right.

When the House Natural Resources Committee considered an amendment to end the Gulf drilling moratorium, 22 representatives voted in favor and 21 voted against. Yet the amendment failed — because five delegates, representing assorted U.S. territories, voted no. (Delegates can vote in committees but not on a bill’s final passage.) Of the five, one represents Puerto Rico, which, as a Caribbean island with 4 million people, perhaps deserves some voice in the matter. But the others were from Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Marianas, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with a combined population short of 500,000. That’s considerably fewer than a congressional district — yet these four delegates cast deciding votes on a vital question of national policy. The practice of giving micro-territories a voice in Congress is questionable in any case, since it is essentially representation without taxation; but having four members on one committee from flyspecks that amount to Democratic pocket boroughs, each with a full vote, makes a joke of the strict democracy that the House of Representatives is supposed to stand for.

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Thomas Sowell looks at administration cynicism on race and immigration.

… Regardless of what immigration policy anyone believes in, the government cannot carry out that policy until after it has first gained control of the borders. Regardless of what Washington politicians may say about how many immigrants should be allowed into the country, or on what basis, none of that matters when the real decision is in the hands of innumerable other people, who can simply climb over a fence along the border and come on in whenever they feel like it.

Even if they get caught, the most that is likely to happen to them is that they get sent back to try again later. In many cases in the past, they have been issued legal documents ordering them to appear in court– and were released inside the United States. Why anyone would think that people who disregarded the border and the fence would take a piece of paper more seriously defies logic.

That doesn’t mean that Washington politicians were stupid. They were political, which is worse. The point was to win Hispanic votes, even though not all Hispanics believe in open borders.

President Obama would rather have an issue with which to win the Hispanic vote than to have a bipartisan bill that would simply take control of the borders. Such a bill would help the country but that obviously takes a back seat in an election year. Even some members of Obama’s own party are uneasy with such cynicism.

Bill Kristol has advice for Charlie Rangel. Tell Obama to shove it. 

President Obama has offered this patronizing advice to Rep. Charlie Rangel:

“And he’s somebody who’s at the end of his career. Eighty years old. I’m sure that what he wants is to be able to end his career with dignity. And my hope is that it happens.”

News flash: Our president really is a self-centered elitist (and ageist!).

Here’s my advice to Charlie: Defend yourself, make your case, fight for your reputation, and if need be accept a reprimand (or even censure)–but let your constituents render the real verdict, not the D.C. mob. If you do this, you have a good chance of extending your political career…beyond Obama’s.

In any case, do not follow Obama’s prescription of political death with dignity. “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

David Goldman looks at our current economic situation and what would help.

…The Fed and the administration claim that the problem is that small businesses can’t get bank loans. The problem, they insist, is monetary policy. Big businesses are being rewarded for laying off workers, stripping down to bare bones, and earning profits on their core businesses. They are—wisely, given the fecklessness at the rudder in Washington—hoarding cash; they don’t want to borrow.

But startup small businesses shouldn’t be financed with bank loans (except for secured financing of inventories and receivables). Most small businesses fail. This is Portfolio Theory 101. If you own the stock of 100 startups, and 99 go bust but one becomes Microsoft, you get rich. But if you are a bank, and you lend money to the 100 startups, and only 1 can pay you back, then you go bust.

Thus startups are financed with equity, not debt. This is taught to first-year finance students.

It doesn’t occur to the somnolent wizards of Constitution Avenue that the way to lure capital back to entrepreneurial activity is to increase the after-tax reward to entrepreneurs, by eliminating the capital gains tax, for example, or, even better, eliminating all taxation of capital income. Monetary policy has nothing to do the case. Monetary policy best addresses currency stability. Tax incentives best address economic growth. …

Financial Times Blog with warnings about our economy.

The ISM Survey of the US manufacturing sector (published on Monday) offers the first reliable glimpse of activity in the US economy in the third quarter of the year. It is not encouraging.

Although the headline reading was rather better than widely anticipated (an out-turn of 55.5 compared to 56.2 in June), the details of the survey showed that new orders are now slowing markedly, and inventories have started to rise more rapidly than companies may be intending. Taken together with the GDP data for Q2 (discussed in an earlier blog), the ISM survey points to a significant danger that the US economy will continue to slow sharply in the months ahead.

The ISM surveys in the US are among the few items of monthly information which are capable of moulding market sentiment in a profound way. This is because they have an excellent track record of picking up changes in trend in US activity, because they are never revised, and because they are published earlier than most other data series on the economy. …

Peter Wehner has quotes and clips of Biden, and some comments on the success of the surge in Iraq.

…One would be hard pressed to think of another person who was as persistently and consistently wrong about the surge as Biden (though Barack Obama would give him a good run for his money). Biden went so far as to advocate dividing up Iraq into three parts based on ethnicity, one of the more ill-informed and dangerous ideas to emerge among war critics.

The truth is that if Joe Biden had had his way, the war would have been lost, Iraq would probably be engulfed in something close to genocide, al-Qaeda would have emerged with its most important victory ever, and America would have sustained a defeat far worse than it did in Vietnam.

As for Biden’s claim that what was lacking in the past was a “coherent political process,” let’s be generous to the vice president: he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The then-American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, was one of its outstanding diplomats. And unlike the situation in Afghanistan under the Obama administration, in Iraq the commanding general at the time (David Petraeus) and the U.S. ambassador (Crocker) worked hand-in-glove. They were an extraordinarily effective team. In order to refresh Biden’s memory of the coherent political process that was in place, he might want to review Ambassador Crocker’s Senate testimony from September 2007, before a committee Biden himself sat on. …

In Forbes, Warren Meyer has unique experience in funds allocation. In an article that was a pleasure to read, he offers his insights on how to encourage economic growth.

…For all the talk about fiscal stimulus and jobs creation at the federal and state level, almost no one in government is doing anything about reducing the roadblocks to investment. For example, millions of people are newly unemployed, and in past recessions a large number of these folks have eschewed looking for a new corporate job and have started businesses of their own. Unfortunately, such prospective entrepreneurs will face a tangle of registration, regulatory and licensing hurdles, many of which have been backed by established businesses that want to avoid just this kind of new competition. …

…No one in government, that I have heard, has even suggested any sort of regulation holiday as a potential economic stimulus program. In fact, most of the legislative moves at the national level have made private investment less attractive. Business people making investments today have to plan for higher labor, energy and borrowing costs due to a series of 2,000-page pieces of legislation that few if anyone fully understand (or have even read). Capital gains tax reductions will almost certainly expire next year, and most business people who look at looming government deficits have to assume these shortfalls will be closed the same way they always have been closed: With new taxes on the backs of the most productive.

Rather than attempting to make investment easier, almost all government stimulus efforts to date have focused on trying to better optimize how and where investment capital is deployed. The core assumption behind all of these programs is that a few people in government can invest money more productively than the private entities from whom the government took the money. …

…To every one of the supporters of these government projects who claim to have created some number of jobs, I encourage the reader to ask a simple question–who was using the money before the government diverted it, and how many jobs were they creating?

It is always heartening to watch someone awaken to the fact that big government and its attendant coercion is not the answer. David Mamet’s essay on liberalism was featured in Pickings on March 19, 2008.  In Commentary, Terry Teachout discusses Mamet’s new book and his change of mind.

…Now Mamet has published a book of essays called Theatre (Faber and Faber, 157 pages) in which, among other things, he seeks to integrate his new way of thinking into his view of the art of drama. Although Theatre is not so much a political treatise as a professional apologia, it seems likely that those of his colleagues who write about it (to date, most have ignored it completely) will focus on its political aspect, in which they will doubtless find much to outrage them. Indeed, he offers a working definition of theater that is bound to fill the vast majority of his colleagues with horror:

“The theatre is a magnificent example of the workings of that particular bulwark of democracy, the free-market economy. It is the most democratic of arts, for if the play does not appeal in its immediate presentation to the imagination or understanding of a sufficient constituency, it is replaced. … It is the province not of ideologues (whether in the pay of the state and called commissars, or tax subsidized through the university system and called intellectuals) but of show folk trying to make a living.”

Conversely, Mamet dismisses state subsidy for the theatrical arts as no more than a means of propping up incompetent “champions of right thinking” whose work would otherwise be incapable of attracting an audience. Such playwrights, he says, are purveyors of politically correct “pseudodramas” that “begin with a conclusion (capitalism, America, men, and so on, are bad) and award the audience for applauding its agreement.” For Mamet, such plays are the opposite of true theater, whose power lies not in its willingness to coddle our preconceptions but its unparalleled ability to shock us into seeing the world as it really is. “In the great drama,” he writes, “we follow a supposedly understood first principle to its astounding and unexpected conclusion. We are pleased to find ourselves able to revise our understanding.”…

WSJ reviewer Mark Bauerlein looks at a book exposing the rot in higher education where the customers are ignored and the people who work there are coddled and spoiled.

Higher education may be heading for a reckoning. For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended. Perhaps they attributed their career success or that of their friends to a diploma. Or they felt moved by a particular professor or class. Or they received treatment at a university hospital or otherwise profited from university-based scientific research. Or they just loved March Madness.

Recently, though, a new public skepticism has surfaced, with galling facts to back it up. Over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition and fees has risen 250% for private schools and nearly 300% for public schools (in constant dollars). The salaries of professors have also risen much faster than those of other occupations. At Stanford, to take but one example, the salaries of full professors have leapt 58% in constant dollars since the mid-1980s. College presidents do even better. From 1992 to 2008, NYU’s presidential salary climbed to $1.27 million from $443,000. By 2008, a dozen presidents had passed the million-dollar mark.

Meanwhile, tenured and tenure-track professors spend ever less time with students. In 1975, 43% of college teachers were classified as “contingent”—that is, they were temporary instructors and graduate students; today that rate is 70%. Colleges boast of high faculty-to-student ratios, but in practice most courses have a part-timer at the podium. …

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Charles Krauthammer discusses Ahmadinejad’s latest comment.

“They [the United States and Israel] have decided to attack at least two countries in the region in the next three months.”

– Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, July 26

…Ahmadinejad’s claim is not supported by a shred of evidence. So what is he up to?

It is a sign that he is under serious pressure. Passage of weak U.N. sanctions was followed by unilateral sanctions by the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union. Already, reports Reuters, Iran is experiencing a sharp drop in gasoline imports as Lloyd’s of London and other players refuse to insure the ships delivering them. …

Peggy Noonan tells Republicans that Chris Christie is the role model to follow.

…National Republicans don’t want to talk about specific cuts in spending for the obvious reason: The Obama administration is killing itself, and when your foe is self-destructing, you must not interrupt. Let the media go forward each day reporting the bad polls. Turn it into “Franco: still dead.” Don’t let the media turn it into a two-part story: “Obama is Struggling and The Republicans Will Cut Your Benefits.”

That is classic, smart political thinking, but wrong. The public thinks we’re sinking as a nation. They want to know someone has a plan to help. The most promising leader in that respect is Mr. Christie, the New Jersey governor, who just closed an $11 billion budget gap without raising taxes. …

…What about the argument that in a recession we need stimulus spending? “It’s dead wrong. More spending with what? The federal government continuing to print more and more money and leaving that debt for our kids? It will only grind the economy down further.” …

…Mr. Christie was direct, unadorned: You can’t tax your way out of a spending problem, you’ve got to stop spending. …

Jennifer Rubin doesn’t think much of Senator Lindsey Graham’s latest idea on illegal immigration.

Lindsey Graham is second to none when it comes to shameless pandering and preening. … But nothing quite tops this:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Thursday that he’s talked with other senators about crafting a constitutional amendment that would deny American citizenship to illegal immigrants’ children born in the United States.

Even the most aggressive figures on immigration reform think this is idiotic. Although we agree on practically nothing concerning this issue, I fully concur with Mark Krikorian on this one:

…“I’m exactly against changing this,” he said. “I think it’s sort of a stupid thing. You would end up with lots of U.S.-born illegal immigrants. There’s something like 300,000 kids born here to illegal immigrants every year.”…

And we have two posts from Mark Krikorian on the subject. Here are some of his thoughts:

Would it be cynical of me to think that McCain’s “little jerk” is just trying to burnish his tough-on-immigration bona fides?: …

…So the guy doesn’t want to do what’s necessary to actually stop illegal immigration, but he wants to make sure that the children born to all the illegals he helps bring here become U.S.-born illegal aliens? I’m afraid, though, that his rationale, whether he actually believes it or not, is in fact one shared by a lot of immigration hawks:

“People come here to have babies,” he said. “They come here to drop a child. It’s called ‘drop and leave.’ To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child’s automatically an American citizen. That shouldn’t be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons.”

I don’t like illegals having U.S.-citizen kids any more than anyone else, but there’s no evidence suggesting that this “drop and leave” stuff is true — anything’s possible, I suppose, but it’s just an assertion at this point. My own sense is that most illegal alien women who have kids here (accounting for nearly 10 percent of all children born in the U.S. each year) didn’t come for that purpose; they came for jobs or to join relatives, and one thing led to another, birds-and-bees style, and they had kids. There are no doubt some people who dash across the border illegally to have kids, but they just can’t amount to a large share of the problem. Nor does the problem of “birth tourism” require a change in the Constitution — we just need to permit (and require) our consular officers to reject visa applications from pregnant women, inviting them to re-apply once they’ve given birth in their own countries. …

And here’s the second post, where Krikorian hears from US citizens whose jobs bring them into contact with women coming to the US to have children.

…And finally this:

Our daughter is an OB/GYN Doc here in Texas. You are correct in that citizenship for illegal’s babies is a symptom of the problem, but it is a real incentive for illegals to come and stay in this country. A couple of anecdotes. A few years ago an illegal walks into the ER on my daughter’s night on call. Mother (of 8 at the time) is in distress, as is the baby at 5 or 6 months. Have to put the mother in the hospital on bedrest for the rest of her pregnancy. Due to good care from our daughter and the hospital nurses, plus entire time in hospital, mother delivers 9th healthy baby a few months later. Disappears, walking out on tens of thousands of dollars, if not a couple hundred thousand, of doctor and hospital bills. Hospital is stiffed, our daughter is stiffed and of course the 9th US citizen is born . . .

I guess my point is I am somewhat in favor of not granting citizenship to the children of illegals, but really prefer sealing the border. If an illegal isn’t here, the citizenship issue isn’t an issue. I fear Graham’s bill is just a grandstand play to pump up his bona fides and not driven by any strong conviction—given his waffling/consorting with the Dem’s on so many other liberal issues. The illegal’s baby citizenship issue is just another bit of smokescreen to hide the real problem and NOT get serious about controlling our borders.

This is exactly my point, though expressed better and more concisely than I did.

David Harsanyi has exciting news about public schools in Washington D.C. and Michelle Rhee, the new chancellor.

…In 2006, 8 percent of eighth-graders in Washington, D.C., could perform minimal math, yet not a single teacher was fired for stinking up the place. In fact, as D.C.’s chancellor, Michelle Rhee, points out, for years over 90 percent of teachers in her district were evaluated as having “exceeded expectations.”

All of this makes Rhee’s decision to fire 241 Washington teachers — after they failed a new (real) evaluation system — a precedent-setting moment. Another 737 teachers could face a similar fate unless they significantly improve their performances. Does anyone doubt many of them will?

Rhee — appointed by a liberal mayor in the bluest of American cities — is a radical in the best sense of the word. Bureaucrats succeed through a devotion to risk-aversion. But Rhee came into the job and immediately commissioned an outside audit of the entire school district, laid off scores of administrators and non-essential staff, and closed more than 20 underperforming schools. …

Jonah Goldberg comments that Obama’s policies are the real environmental disaster.

…But now it increasingly appears that “the worst environmental disaster in American history” wasn’t all that bad. Yes, the loss of human life was tragic, and the loss of animal life was regrettable — but it also wasn’t that dramatic. Some birds were oiled and died, always a sad sight. But according to Time, the number of birds killed is — so far — less than 1 percent of the avian casualties of the Exxon Valdez. And to date, only three oiled mammal carcasses have been recovered. Three.

…The greatest damage from the Deepwater Horizon disaster (and yes, even with the hyper-deflation, it’s still a disaster) has been from the federal government. The drilling ban imposed by the administration, against the counsel of the sort of “sound science” Obama usually sanctifies, has been devastating to the region, costing thousands of jobs and untold millions in lost revenues and taxes. …
Meanwhile, if Obama is serious about driving America forward to a green economy “even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there,” he will take the Gulf region’s devastation on the road, destroying good jobs across the country (the oil and gas industry pays twice the national average) and replacing them with bad ones. He will replace cheap energy with expensive energy. (During the campaign, he promised that his plan would cause electricity rates to “skyrocket.”) He will place bets on unproven technologies while discarding proven ones. In short, he will nationalize a disastrous disaster policy. …

In Forbes, Shikha Dalmia says that the energy bill is a lot more vanilla now that the global warming hoax has been revealed. But do the Dems have any parliamentary rule tricks left? Will cap-and-trade magically reappear if the energy bill gets to conference?

Future historians will pinpoint Democratic Sen. Harry Reid’s energy legislation, released Tuesday, as the moment that the political movement of global warming entered an irreversible death spiral. It is kaput! Finito! Done!

…Not only does the bill avoid all mention of an economy-wide emission cap through a cap-and-tax–oops, cap-and-trade–scheme, it even avoids capping emissions or imposing renewable electricity standards on utility companies, the minimum that enviros had hoped for. Beyond stricter regulations on off-shore drilling, it offers subsidies to both homeowners to encourage them to make their homes more energy efficient and the nation’s fleet of trucks to use cleaner burning natural gas. This is not costless, but it is a bargain compared with the “comprehensive” action on energy and climate change that President Barack Obama had been threatening.

…The truth is that there never has been an environmental issue that has enjoyed greater corporate support. Early in the global warming crusade, a coalition of corporations called United States Climate Action Partnership was formed with the express purpose of lobbying Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It included major utilities (Duke Energy) and gas companies (BP) that stood to gain by hobbling the coal industry through a cap-and-trade scheme. …

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In the Telegraph, UK, Simon Heffer comments on Obami ineffectiveness in governance.

The shock about coming to America after an absence of four months is how, in that time, respect for and confidence in President Obama has slumped. It wasn’t good in March; now the effect of what one blogger has called his apparent “impotence” has taken hold. It is not clear what Mr Obama actually does. He isn’t engaged with the economy; he certainly isn’t engaged with foreign policy; he has abandoned hope of a climate change bill this year (and probably for ever); he has seen his health care bill into law, but America awaits news of how it will be implemented; he is under attack for a casual approach to illegal immigration, notably from the Mexican narco-state. He has only just girded himself to go campaigning for his party in the mid-term elections. Last Sunday was the 100-days-to-go mark, and the talk in politics here is of little else. Joe Biden, the vice-president, has been nominated as “campaigner in chief”. Why? What is the President doing?

He appears to be reading the newspapers and the blogs and watching television. Last week, a twisted opponent put out a selectively edited video of a black Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, apparently admitting discriminating against a white farmer. Mrs Sherrod had done nothing of the sort – either the discrimination or, therefore, the admission of it – but was immediately sacked, for fear that Fox News was about to broadcast the video. This outrageous act was followed by an even more outrageous apology by the president the next day  …

…This immediate proof of mismanagement adds to the cumulative feeling on so many other fronts that Mr Obama and his team simply don’t understand governance. Last month Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned America that without more care being taken it could have a Greece-style debt problem. The president seemed to regard this warning as so self-evidently absurd that he quickly asked Congress for another $50 billion for various social projects. Last week, benefits for the long-term unemployed were extended for another six months at a cost of $34 billion. The health care programme is forecast to cost at least $863 billion. The total deficit this year is to be $1.47 trillion. America’s debt is likely to be $18.5 trillion by 2020, though it will be so low as that only if growth is maintained at 4 per cent: it is currently 3 per cent, and rocky.

Unemployment is 9.5 per cent and forecast to stay there for the time being. There are three million more jobless than when Mr Obama came to power, and unemployment among teenagers is around 25 per cent. …

Noemie Emery sees the same things as she catalogs the rise and fall of the Left. It is hard to think how Obama could have played his hand more poorly.

…What happened? Obama may have begun believing there was a coalition in place for the changes he wanted, but, for at least six different reasons, he and his friends were wrong. First, bad as it was, 2009 was no 1933, a perilous time when the country was not only strapped, but teetering on the raw edge of a social implosion. Second, Obama was no FDR, a political master who with one major exception—his court-packing plan after his 1936 landslide—had near-perfect pitch for what the country could take at each given moment, and seldom moved past these parameters. Third, when FDR became president, the crisis had already gone on for three years with no improvement; Obama’s crisis had gone on for just four months, and the first steps to check it had already been taken. Fourth, this crash had been caused largely by leverage and debate, which made people averse to more borrowing and spending. Fifth, when FDR came on the scene, the country arguably was undergoverned, with few regulations, and no safety nets. In 2009, this was hardly the case. Sixth and last, FDR and his voters hadn’t lived through a sorry decade like the 1970s, which had shown that while no regulation and no safety nets did not work well, too much of both didn’t work either. If trust in markets was no longer unbounded, neither was trust in the state. Those 60-plus years of experience made a very big difference. The era of big government being over was a whole lot more durable than Obama had thought.

Had Obama really been FDR, this would not have surprised him, as transformative leaders are always in touch with their times. …

…As Henninger concluded, “Barack Obama took a rising reservoir of public trust for his party .??.??. and emptied it.” Gallup’s annual Confidence in Institutions poll, conducted in the second week of July, showed that only 11 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress. “Half of Americans now say they have ‘very little’ or ‘no’ confidence in Congress, up from 38 percent in 2009—and the highest for any institution since Gallup first asked this question in 1973.” Talk about change, if you care to. And as for health care, Obama’s major achievement, when the bill passed, it was opposed by a 20-point spread by the general public, and since then it has only sunk lower. In some polls, around 60 percent of respondents say that they want it repealed. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on two governors who are bucking the big-government-is-the-answer trend.

Gov. Chris Christie continues to earn kudos from conservatives and liberals alike. Gov. Bob McDonnell has a 64 percent approval after less than a year as Virginia’s governor. Both Christie and McDonnell are garnering praise for doing what inside-the-Beltway Democrats refuse to do — cut spending, resist calls to hike taxes, and stand up to public-employee unions. … They provide a vivid contrast to Obamaism and to the notion that only by a massive increase in the size of government and corresponding tax increases can we pull out of our economic tailspin. …

RealClearPolitics.com has some wonderful quotes from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

NJ Gov. Chris Christie on “Morning Joe”: This teacher complaining, they’re getting four-to-five percent salary increases a year in a zero percent inflation world; they get free health benefits from the day they’re hired–for their entire family–until the day they die. They believe they’re entitled to this shelter from the recession when the people who are paying for that shelter are the people who have been laid off, who have lost their homes, had their hours cut back, and all we asked them to do was freeze their salary for one year and pay one-and-a-half percent of their salary for their health benefits. For the average teacher in New Jersey, you’re talking about $750 a year for full-family health coverage. Now, I don’t think that’s a lot to ask, and I don’t think we can continue anymore to be having the good people of New Jersey who have been laid off and all the rest–as much as I love teachers–you know, everyone’s got to be part of the sacrifice.

…

Sorkin: Are you not worried though about spending in your state in terms of those teachers who are actually going to be taking these cuts, whether they are going to be able to keep spending in the state and what that means for the economy?

Christie: First of all, they’re not taking any cuts. I asked them to take cuts, and they said no. So, what cuts are they taking? These teachers are still getting their four or five percent increases. That interplay that you just saw was about me trying to convince people that they need to take a freeze, but, in the end, they didn’t. The state teachers union said–they had a rally in Trenton against me. 35,000 people came from the teachers. You know what that rally was? The “me first” rally. “Pay me my raise first. Pay me my free health benefits first. Pay me my pension first. And everybody else in New Jersey, get to the back of the line.” Well, you know what? I’m not going to sit by and allow that to go unnoticed, so we’ll shine a bright light on it, and we’ll see how the people react. But I think we are seeing how the people of New Jersey are reacting, and that’s how you make it politically palatable in other states in the country. Just shine a bright light on greed and self-interest.”

Michael Barone looks at polling numbers and what similar numbers have meant in the past.

…To see why, take a look at the generic ballot question — which party’s candidate will you vote for in elections to the House? The current realclearpolitics.com average shows Republicans ahead by 45 to 41 percent. …

…So the Republicans’ current lead in the generic ballot question suggests they may be on the brink of doing better than in any election since 1946, when they won a 245-188 margin in the House — larger than any they’ve held ever since.

Another metric is daunting for Democrats. Polls in House races almost always show incumbents ahead of challengers, because incumbent members of Congress are usually much better known than their opponents. An incumbent running below 50 percent is considered potentially in trouble; an incumbent running behind a challenger is considered in deep doo-doo.

…Today a lot more Democratic incumbents seem to be trailing Republican challengers in polls. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online has compiled a list of 13 Democratic incumbents trailing in polls released over the past seven weeks. …

Almost two months ago Pickings first featured some articles on the lack of long-term damage from oil spills. We featured Abe Greenwald’s piece on May 31st and a Popular Mechanics list of largest spills on June 5th. We have two pieces today that indicate the environmental problems from the Deepwater spill are already less than originally predicted.

Now it is Time magazine’s turn to display some common sense. It looks like Michael Grunwald is going to have to turn in his Liberal card. In Time, he writes about the oil spill and its minimal effects on the environment. Grunwald does slap Limbaugh around before saying Rush has a point. So maybe he’ll keep his liberal bona fides.

…Well, Limbaugh has a point. The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it’s no leak; it’s the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It’s also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it’s important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared,” says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana. …

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we’ve heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year. …

…The scientists I spoke with cite four basic reasons the initial eco-fears seem overblown. First, the Deepwater oil, unlike the black glop from the Valdez, is unusually light and degradable, which is why the slick in the Gulf is dissolving surprisingly rapidly now that the gusher has been capped. Second, the Gulf of Mexico, unlike Alaska’s Prince William Sound, is very warm, which has helped bacteria break down the oil. Third, heavy flows of Mississippi River water have helped keep the oil away from the coast, where it can do much more damage. And finally, Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient. Van Heerden’s assessment team showed me around Casse-tete Island in Timbalier Bay, where new shoots of Spartina grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were growing on the first black mangroves I’ve ever seen that were actually black. …

Even Vanity Fair sees the light. Julie Weiner posts on the search for spilled oil. If only environmentalists could find the oil, they could secure more government grants.

Scientists and government officials are currently on the hunt for much of the oil that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, reports The Washington Post. While experts remain positive that the oil is still in the Gulf—“That stuff’s somewhere,” a researcher hypothesized to the paper—most of it is AWOL. According to the Post, “[u]p to 4 million barrels (167 million gallons), the vast majority of the spill, remains unaccounted for in government statistics. Some of it has, most likely, been cleaned up by nature. Other amounts may be gone from the water, but they could have taken on a second life as contaminants in the air, or in landfills around the Gulf Coast.” …