The American economy lost 467,000 more jobs in June, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in a sobering indication that the longest recession since the 1930s had yet to release its hold.

When you are vice president of the United States, you can control a lot of things. One thing you cannot control, as Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. discovered Friday morning here, is the weather. Mr. Biden, on a two-day diplomatic mission to Iraq – his first trip to the country since becoming vice president — had intended to get around town a bit, and had hoped to fly by helicopter to a breakfast meeting Friday morning with the top American commander here, General Ray Odierno, and the new ambassador, Christopher Hill. Instead, he was grounded by intense sandstorms — but not before he got a chance to fly.

Nowhere did the NYT remind readers that gasbag Joe Biden once proclaimed that Iraq could not survive as a single nation and must be (contrary to the will of its elected government) be partititioned into three countries.

Biden was wrong about Iraq. Obama was wrong about Iraq. Both are willing to take credit for the success of George. W. Bush.

Here’s a true story: in an Iranian village in the mid 1990s, a husband with the hots for a 14-year-old girl, wrongly accused his wife of infidelity for which she was stoned to death. Her father, husband and sons all threw stones.

The story has been made into a grisly film, The Stoning of Soraya M. opening today.

In the NYT, critic Stephen Holden writes:

Almost everything is either-or. Soraya is a beautiful martyred innocent and Zahra a stormy feminist prophet. With the exception of the mayor (David Diaan), who has qualms about the execution, and Mr. Caviezel’s reporter, who appears only briefly at the beginning and end of the movie, the men are fiendishly villainous.

Mr. Negahban’s Ali [the scheming husband], who resembles a younger, bearded Philip Roth, suggests an Islamic fundamentalist equivalent of a Nazi anti-Semitic caricature. With his malevolent smirk and eyes aflame with arrogance and hatred, he is as satanic as any horror-movie apparition. The fraudulent local mullah, who collaborates in his scheme after being rejected by Soraya, might as well be carrying a pitchfork and breathing fire.

Assuming the facts of the story, how could the story not be good vs. evil? Comparing the depiction of a truly evil man with the invented, evil stereotype of Jews promulgated by the Nazis is absurd.

Jews do not kidnap Christian children to drink their blood. Primitive Muslims do stone their wives.

by J.C. Phillips

My son was confused. “Why does everyone hate America?” Sadly he wasn’t referring to Iran or even France. He was talking about the other children in his class. Apparently during his 6th grade class discussions a great many of his classmates expressed hatred for their country. Not only did they blame America for everything that was wrong in the world and condemn this nation for its greed and materialism, a great many of them expressed a desire to live someplace else. They believed New Zealand or Canada would allow them the opportunity to grow up without the stain and humiliation of being an American.

Now I was confused. I suspect the sentiments expressed by these children were more reflective of their parents’ beliefs than they were of any deep thought by the children themselves. Yet I am puzzled by such vitriol coming from children (and parents) advantaged with more liberty and opportunity than any other people in the history of the world.

I am, however, not discouraged. I know that in spite of the inclination of his classmates (and their parents)the majority of Americans love their country and love being Americans. No offense to New Zealand, but I suspect there is only a small number of Americans aspiring to live as ex-pats in Auckland. The truth is that even those that are critical of America love her dearly.

In order to demonstrate my theory I have begun asking people - friends and strangers alike - what they love about America. As one might suspect liberty, freedom of speech, freedom to worship and capitalism peppered most answers, but some of the other things people have pointed to may surprise you.

Among the terrific answers I received were the Grambling State University marching band, over-priced coffee, Thelonious Monk, South Beach, Times Square, Levi’s, Sandra Bullock and The Cosby Show. (To that list I would add: Western films, Gene Autry & Randolph Scott, The Fighting Irish of Notre Dame, Count Basie and Parliament Funkadelic.)

A teenager from Ecuador was adamant that she loves America because it is orderly. People obey traffic laws, wait their turn in lines and generally follow the rules. (Poor girl has obviously never spent any time in Manhattan.) When she goes home to visit relatives people tend to drive when, where and as fast as they like, push and shove — disorder is the rule.

My favorite response was from a man I met at a public service conference. He was emphatic: “What do I love about America? Tacos!”

It may be that this gentleman’s answer comes closest to articulating what is truly great about America: The American people, like American cuisine, are an amalgamation of different cultures and traditions that, once on these shores, begin to blend together-borrowing from and lending to each other until they become the essence of that being known as the American. It is this phenomenon described in our national motto: E Pluribus Unum - out of many, one.

But it is not what we have in America that continues to lure people across our borders, it is what we believe.

Americans are the most idealistic people on the planet. By that I do not mean a belief in some squishy utopianism. I mean that Americans are still committed to making real the ideals articulated in the principles of our founding.

It’s a shame that some American children are being taught to despise their country; that is folly for which their parents will have to answer in the future. They are, however, decidedly in the minority. Most Americans love America not because she is perfect but because most Americans esteem liberty, believe in the promise of equality and maintain a regard for private property. I would love to hear what you love about America. Give it some thought over the 4th and let me hear from you.

Tim Cavanaugh in Reason:

Lose what little faith you still have in your fellow Americans with the new Mortgage Metrics Report. For the first time, the quarterly report [pdf] from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision includes information on redefault rates for modified mortgage loans.

That is, lenders are increasingly offering supposedly distressed borrowers substantial reductions in principal and interest payments. (See page 25 to see how rapidly these modifications are becoming much more charitable to the borrowers.) Redefault data track how many of these renegotiated loans end up back in trouble. There’s a wide variety in types and degrees of trouble — everything from 30 days’ tardiness on payments to completed foreclosures.

But one pattern emerges when you add up all the redefaults per quarter and compare them to the total number of loan modifications: When you take deadbeats and give them a free opportunity to get out of contractual obligations they willingly signed before God and country, a fairly reliable majority of them — and often a fillibuster-proof 60+ percent — end up deadbeating again.

In general, the more loans you modify, the higher the percentage of redefaults: In the first quarter of 2008, 68,001 loans were modified, and 40,206, or 59 percent, of those have ended up 30 days late again, or worse. In the first quarter of 2009, 185,156 loan mods were done, and of those, 120,067, or 64 percent, ended up in trouble. (Check my math: to get a total-in-trouble number I’m adding up “30-59 days Delinquent,” “60 or More Days Delinquent,” “In Process of Foreclosure,” and “Completed Foreclosure.” To be sporting, I’m leaving “Short Sale or Deed-in-Lieu of Foreclosure” out.)

If there’s any good news in this, it may be that while the total number of loan modifications is skyrocketing, the percentage of redefaults is increasing sporadically relative to total loan mods, rather than growing in a straight line. So in the fourth quarter of 2008, for example, only 46.9 percent of modified loans ended up back in trouble.

But even that isn’t really encouraging, because some of the “trouble” categories were artificially depressed in that period (through, for example, statewide foreclosure moratoriums in effect in some of the most deadbeat-rich areas). Also, the terms of loan mods are getting much more generous: Where last year banks tended to offer only small gestures like maturity-lengthening or a slightly better interest rate, now they’re offering to reduce principal, pay all closing costs for new mortgages etc.

So if these borrowers really are honest citizens who just need help getting back on their feet, the percentage of redefaulting loans should be going down, not up. That’s not the case, because they are not honest citizens. They’re deadbeats, and it’s time to stop pretending they can be anything else.

Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks

Sub-prime mortgages, financial collapse, MPs expenses: these and other recent scandals are more than mere passing events. They have left Parliament and the market, the twin foundations of the free society, in disarray.

What has been lost is trust — our trust in those we chose to look after our affairs — and trust is the basis of society. If we are to recover it, we must ask some deep questions.

Thus far we have had a festival of blame, and there have been some sacrificial victims. But our great faiths teach the principle of collective responsibility. In that spirit we should ask what has gone wrong in society as a whole?

I believe we have lost our traditional sense of morality. I do not mean that we are less moral than our grandparents. We care about things they hardly thought about: world poverty, inequality, global warming and the loss of biodiversity. We are more tolerant than they were.

But note this: the things we care about are vast, distant, global, remote. They are problems that require the co-ordinated action of millions, perhaps billions of people. The difference we as individuals can make to any one of them is minimal. That does not mean they are not important: they are. But they are issues of politics, not of morality in the conventional sense.

When it comes to personal behaviour we have now come to believe that there is no right and wrong. Instead, there are choices. The market facilitates those choices. The State handles the consequences, picking up the pieces when they go wrong.

The idea that there may be things we would like to do and can afford to do but which we should not do, because they are dishonourable and a betrayal of trust, has come to seem outmoded.

Jonah Goldberg:

What did you do when capitalism died, Daddy?

I won’t be surprised to hear that question from my daughter by the time she gets out of college — or should I say the State Mandatory Voluntarism Training Facility?

When liberals hear conservatives decry the death of capitalism, they titter and roll their eyes. “Oh, you paranoid right-wingers! You see Bolsheviks around every corner.”

But such exasperation is the exhalation of concentrated ignorance. The absence of free markets isn’t necessarily Bolshevism, or even socialism. Capitalism’s death can come in many forms, by many different hands.

After all, not all of Julius Caesar’s murderers thought alike. They were united in their belief Caesar had to go, not necessarily on what would replace him. Caesar fought off his attackers until he saw that among their number was Brutus, his friend. “Et tu, Brute?” he exclaimed; “You, too, Brutus?” It was not the enemy blows but his friend’s betrayal that sapped his will to fight and brought his downfall.

Some historians claim Caesar actually said, “Tu quoque, fili mi?” or, “You too, my child?”

Whether that’s more accurate, it certainly seems a more fitting declaration as the coup de grâce of capitalism’s murder is at the hands of its most successful child: big business.

Everywhere we look we see the great and once-great beneficiaries of free markets running to the state for protection from the cruel bullying of competition. On health care, insurance companies and others repeat the mantra that they want to be “at the table rather than on the menu,” all the better to be positioned as a tax collector of the welfare state. General Motors and Chrysler have gone from being pimped-out prostitutes of the state to outright chattel more akin to the leather-bound gimp in Pulp Fiction, eager to do the bidding of the president and the UAW.

Once-proud companies like GE have become seduced by global-warming schemes because they recognize that there’s more money to be made selling white elephants to Uncle Sam than there is selling competitive products consumers want. Indeed, cap-and-trade taxes promise to deliver precisely the protectionist industrial policies the Left has dreamed of for decades, only under a “progressive” label.

This week, Philip Morris, the biggest of the big tobacco companies, supported and won passage of an “anti-tobacco” bill that will make it easier for Philip Morris (a subsidiary of Altria) to sell cigarettes by making it harder for smaller, more innovative firms to compete. One way it will do that is by curtailing the First Amendment rights of tobacco companies, making it harder to advertise their products (including healthier alternatives to normal cigarettes). Philip Morris, maker of Marlboro and other established brands, already controls 50 percent of the market. That’s why it lobbied government to keep it that way. (more…)

Most Democrats, including our current prez, were wrong about Iraq. Worse, it was only a political football to them. Ralph Peters:

OUR effort in Iraq passed a major milestone today: Our troops are leaving the cities.

Advisers remain in place. Joint patrols will still occur. And our forces will wait nearby to respond to Iraqi calls for support. But the last of the bases and US-only outposts within Iraq’s urban centers will be vacated.

Terrorists have already begun testing the new security arrangements. Iraqi forces won’t always pass with flying colors.

Yet this situation seemed a pipe dream not so long ago: Iraq’s security forces, serving an elected government, assume primary responsibility for the good order of their own country.

We all recall the delighted leftist claims that Iraq had entered a hopeless civil war. Wrong. That Iraqis preferred al Qaeda to us. Wrong. That Shia militias represented the people. Wrong. And that Iran would seize control. Wrong again.

Looking back over six years of good intentions, tragic errors, generosity, arrogance, partisan vituperation, painful deaths and ultimate vindication, two things strike me: the ever-resisted lesson that human affairs are more complex than academic theories claim, and the simple truth that most human beings prefer a measure of freedom to immeasurable repression.

Now the symbolism of our troops withdrawing from Iraq’s cities is richer than Washington grasps. Mesopotamia created urban culture: Ur, Babylon, Nineveh and countless lesser-known sites are where humans first worked out ways to live together in close quarters in large numbers. The coming wave of terror will strike cities that make Baghdad seem a youngster.

The “cradle of civilization” is rising from the grave again. (more…)

Democrat Karen Bass, speaker of the California Assembly, in the LA Times.

Q: How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work?

A: The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue and your career is over.” I don’t know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it’s about free speech, but it’s extremely unfair.

The conservative-talk-as-terrorism meme is persistent. Remember, the left kept bitching about (non existent) censorship and claimed dissent was patriotic. But that’s only when they’re talking.

…was the basis for Paul Krugman’s “deniers are treasonous” rant in the NYT.  The Financial Post of Canada asked Kesten C. Green And J. Scott Armstrong, respected academics, to review MIT’s work.

When we drive on a long bridge over a river or fly in a passenger aircraft, we expect the bridge and the plane to have been designed and built in ways that are consistent with proven scientific principles. Should we expect similar standards to apply to forecasts that are intended to help policymakers make important decisions that will affect people’s jobs and even their lives? Of course we should. Such standards exist. But are they being followed?

The Financial Post asked us to look at a report last month from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, titled “Probabilistic Forecast for 21st Century Climate based on uncertainties in emissions (without policy) and climate parameters.”

The MIT report authors predicted that, without massive government action, global warming could be twice as severe as previously forecast, and more severe than the official projections of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The MIT authors said their report is based in part on 400 runs of a computer model of the global climate and economic activity.

While the MIT group espouses lofty-sounding objectives to provide leadership with “independent policy analysis and public education in global environmental change,” we found their procedures inconsistent with important forecasting principles. No more than 30% of forecasting principles were properly applied by the MIT modellers and 49 principles were violated. For an important problem such as this, we do not think it is defensible to violate a single principle.

For example, MIT forecasters should have shrunk forecasts of change in the face of uncertainty about predictions of the explanatory variables; in this case the variables postulated to influence temperatures. More generally, they should also have been conservative in this situation of high uncertainty and instability. They were not.

Read it all.

IBD:

…Unlike so many other jilted political wives of recent times, Jenny Sanford was not convinced by her ambitious husband or his aides to take part in the charade of standing with him disingenuously at some circuslike press conference. The cameras would not get their image of offender and victim, side by side.

Instead, the visual the media would be forced to accept was video of the first lady taking some well-deserved vacation time with family. This wife, so dedicated to her husband’s aspirations that she actually managed his campaigns, told reporters that the governor’s career was “the least of my concerns.”

The former Wall Street executive was even able to present a cheerful face to the swarm of reporters at the side of the car she was driving, as she headed off for some R&R.

“I’ve got both my sisters,” she said, pointing to them in the vehicle with her. ”Am I okay? You know what, I have great faith and I have great friends and great family. And you know, we have a good Lord in this world, and I know I’m gonna be fine. Not only will I survive; I’ll thrive.”

She added: “I don’t know whether he’ll be with me, but I’m gonna do my best to work on our marriage because I believe in marriage. I believe in raising good kids; it’s the most important thing in the world.”

Driving away, she grinningly left the reporters with this sassy goodbye: “I wish we had room on the boat for y’all, but we do not!”

That’s a first lady worth being faithful to. South Carolinians and all Americans won’t soon forget her. Too bad Gov. Sanford did.

Paul Krugman in 2007:

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda — which is very different from simply being people of faith — is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It’s also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.

Krugman was both right and wrong. Christians never turned the USA into a theocracy (about this time, Paris Hilton was rising to fame, not infamy, because of her porno tape — some theocracy!) but rather the Green Secular Religionists.

Intolerance? Just dare question the Green articles of faith, especially Global Warming, er, Climate Change.

Here’s Krugman yesterday in his NYT column, writing about the debate over the Democrats’ cap and trade bill — the one never printed, never read but yet passed by the House:

…as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

So to question the science of climate change — something thousands of legitimate scientists are doing — make you a traitor.

A tutorial from London’s Telegraph.

Thomas Sowell:

…Cars didn’t cost nearly as much in the past, when they didn’t have air-conditioning, power steering and high-tech safety features. Homes were cheaper when they were smaller, had fewer bathrooms and lacked such conveniences as built-in microwave ovens.

We would like to have all these things without the rising costs that come with them. But only with medical care is such wishful thinking taken seriously, with government regarded as a sort of fairy godmother who will give us the benefits without the costs.

A cynic is said to be someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If so, then it is political cynicism to point to other countries that spend less on medical care, including some countries where there is “universal health care” provided “free” by their governments.

Just as medical care, houses and cars were all cheaper when they lacked things that they have today, so medical care in other countries is cheaper when they lack many things that are more readily available in the United States.

There are more than four times as many Magnetic Resonance Imaging units (MRIs) per capita in the United States as in Britain or Canada, where there are government-run medical systems. There are more than twice as many CT scanners per capita in the United States as in Canada and more than four times as many per capita as in Britain.

Is it surprising that such things cost money?

The cost of developing a new pharmaceutical drug is now about a billion dollars. Neither political rhetoric nor government bureaucracies will make those costs go away.

We can, of course, refuse to pay these and other medical costs, just as we can refuse to buy air-conditioned homes with built-in microwave ovens. But that just means we pay attention only to prices and not to the value of what we get for those prices.

We can even refuse to pay for so many doctors. But that just means that we will have to wait longer to see a doctor– as people do in countries with government-run medical systems.

In Canada, 27 percent of the people who have surgery wait four months or more. In Britain, 38 percent wait that long. But only 5 percent of Americans wait that long for surgery.

Surgery may well cost less in countries with government-run medical systems– if you count only the money cost, and not the time the patients have to endure the ailments that require surgery, or the fact that some conditions become worse, or even fatal, while waiting.

A recent report from the Fraser Institute in Canada shows that patients there wait an average of ten weeks to get an MRI, just to find out what is wrong with them. A lot of bad things can happen in 10 weeks, ranging from suffering to death.

Politicians may talk about “bringing down the cost of medical care,” but they seldom even attempt to bring down the costs. What they bring down is the price– which is to say, they refuse to pay the costs.

A tip for Obama: if Hugo Chavez, Danlle Ortega and Fidel Castro are for something, take the other side. Instead, Obama has joined them in condemning the “military coup” that ousted President Mel Zelaya.

Apparently, Obama’s advisors haven’t looked closely at the situation. This wasn’t a banana republic coup, it was a nation standing up for the rule of law against a rogue president.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes in the WSJ:

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court’s order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

It remains to be seen what Mr. Zelaya’s next move will be. It’s not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.

And for that, they are being condemned.

The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

Discouraging news. Trita Parsi and Reza Aslan

Iran’s popular uprising, which began after the June 12 election, may be heading for a premature ending. In many ways, the Ahmadinejad government has succeeded in transforming what was a mass movement into dispersed pockets of unrest. Whatever is now left of this mass movement is now leaderless, unorganized — and under the risk of being hijacked by groups outside Iran in pursuit of their own political agendas.

In 1999, students in Iran demonstrated against the closing of reformist newspapers. The unrest lasted a few days and was brutally suppressed. The demonstrators were almost exclusively students. No other segments of society joined their ranks in any meaningful numbers. With their limited appeal to other segments of society, the demonstrators failed to grow in numbers and attain their political objectives.

The demonstrations following the Iranian election on June 12 share few if any characteristics of the student uprising of 1999. What we have witnessed taking place in Iran is a mass movement attracting supporters from all walks of life, all demographics, all classes, and even all political backgrounds. Even supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have expressed discomfort with the developments in Iran, arguing that they voted for Ahmadinejad because they thought he would be a better president, and not because he would be a better dictator.

Indeed, the post-election demonstrations have neither been an uprising of intellectuals and students nor die-hard anti-regime elements from northern Tehran. Instead, the masses that poured in the streets included large numbers of people who often have been loyal to the Iranian government and who in many ways have a stake in its survival. (We can call them Iran’s political middle, or its swing voters.) This is precisely why this movement has constituted such a threat to the Iranian government — not once since 1979 has such an alliance of Iranians come together. (more…)

WaPo:

THE CONGRESSIONAL Budget Office has a tough job: to provide America’s lawmakers with a reality check on their tax and spending plans. Not surprisingly, the CBO’s projections are not always received cheerfully. Both President Obama and leading congressional Democrats were less than thrilled when the CBO estimated that the costs of universal health coverage would be much higher than advertised. To be sure, projecting the cost of legislation involves making assumptions and constructing models that may or may not prove accurate 10 years down the road. Nonetheless, the CBO, with its tradition of scholarly independence, is the best available arbiter, and Congress must heed its numbers — like them or not.

Now comes the CBO with yet more news of the sort that neither Capitol Hill nor the White House is likely to welcome: its freshly released report on the federal government’s long-term financial situation. To put it bluntly, the fiscal policy of the United States is unsustainable. Debt is growing faster than gross domestic product. Under the CBO’s most realistic scenario, the publicly held debt of the U.S. government will reach 82 percent of GDP by 2019 — roughly double what it was in 2008. By 2026, spiraling interest payments would push the debt above its all-time peak (set just after World War II) of 113 percent of GDP. It would reach 200 percent of GDP in 2038.

This huge mass of debt, which would stifle economic growth and reduce the American standard of living, can be avoided only through spending cuts, tax increases or some combination of the two. And the longer government waits to get its financial house in order, the more it will cost to do so, the CBO says.

The CBO’s new long-term forecast is considerably more pessimistic than the one it issued 18 months ago, mostly because of the recession, which has driven the budget deficit above 12 percent of GDP. But the report makes clear that the recent economic downturn did not cause the government’s predicament and that the situation will not necessarily improve once the economy does. The principal cause of long-term fiscal distress is the aging of the U.S. population, coupled with rising health-care costs — which, together, will drive spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to new heights. Unchecked, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid combined will grow from almost 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent by 2035 — and to more than 17 percent of GDP by 2080.

Like his predecessors, Mr. Obama is aware of this issue. Like them, he has promised a plan to deal with it. And like them, he has not come up with anything credible yet. It’s time for that to change.

William Kristol:

Here’s how President Obama concluded an interview in the Oval Office today:

“But, look, I just think that what we’ve been doing over the last six months is getting people back into fighting trim. This is a town where there was just a belief that nothing could get done….I’ll use just the workout metaphor, and that is, you know, when you start training again and you’re pushing your body a little bit harder, sometimes it hurts. But if you keep on at it, after a while your body adjusts. And I think that’s what’s happening to politics in Washington. Folks have been sitting on the couch for a while, and now they’re starting to feel like, hey, you know what, I can run. And that’s why we’re getting stuff done.”

All hail our new personal trainer! Until he entered the White House, everyone was a mere couch potato.

Funny. I’d thought that, a couple of years ago, when the war in Iraq was going badly, it was Sen. Obama who wanted to give up because, he thought, “nothing could get done.” I’d thought it was President Bush, and Sens. McCain and Lieberman, and Gens. Petraeus and Odierno, who had insisted on making great exertions to try to turn the situation around. But I guess they were just sitting on the couch.

I’d also thought that Bush, McCain, and some Democrats had made real efforts a couple of years ago to try to deal responsibly with the difficult issue of immigration. I’d thought that it was Senator Obama who had supported poison-pill amendments that killed the bill, thus ensuring “that nothing could get done.” But I guess the immigration reformers were just sitting on the couch.

And I guess history began on Jan. 20th, 2009.

But wait–what about last couple of weeks? Some serious people thought the United States could do some good by weighing in on behalf of the Iranian people against their regime. President Obama apparently believed that nothing much could be done. Wasn’t he the one playing the couch potato in the midst of an international crisis?

But I guess the president was too busy to focus on helping demonstrators fighting the regime in Iran. He was busy getting us Americans “back into fighting trim.”

Radio talker Dennis Prager says there are two parties in the USA: the dumb party (GOP) and the destructive party (Democrats). I think it’s possible to be destructive because you’re dumb.

Witness the climate change bill that passed the House without anyone reading it — there wasn’t even a printed copy of the bill to be read before the vote.

From the AP’s story on the climate bill.

“It fundamentally will change how we use, produce and consume energy, ending the country’s love affair with big gas guzzling cars and its insatiable appetite for cheap electricity. This bill will put smaller, more efficient cars on the road, swap smokestacks for windmills and solar panels and transform the appliance you can buy for your house.”

Laws will not end Americans’ preference for larger, safer vehicles, it will only thwart their efforts to get them. And, pray tell, who does not want cheap electricity?

UPDATE: EPA apears to have suppressed a skeptical report on C02

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward…and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”

From the preface:

Kimberly Strassel:

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.

If you haven’t heard of this politician, it’s because he’s a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country’s carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers.

Michael Jackson’s death sparks bus brawl.

A fight broke out on a Florida bus when news of Michael Jackson’s death sparked debate over whether he should be remembered as a great musical talent, and one passenger was charged with assault, police said on Friday.

The bus was moving through the city of North Lauderdale on Thursday when passenger James Kiernan received a text message about Jackson’s death on his cell phone, and he read it aloud on the bus, the Broward County Sheriff’s Department said.

The unidentified bus driver opined that “Michael Jackson should have been in jail long ago,” prompting Kiernan, 60, to retort that “the world just lost a great musical talent,” the police report said.

It said the last remark enraged another passenger, Henry Wideman, who started a swearing match with Kiernan, then pulled out a knife and chased Kiernan down the aisle with it.

the.great.global.warming.swindle

Have a bit of patience - it pays off. HT: Susan Gertson.

Mark Steyn:

In a lousy week, Mark Sanford had one stroke of luck: Michael Jackson chose the day after the governor’s press conference to moonwalk into eternity, and thus gave the media’s pop therapists a more rewarding subject to feast on — or, at any rate, one of the few stories whose salient points are weirder than Sanford’s. Not that the governor didn’t do his best to keep his end up on the pop-culture allusions: “I’ve spent the last five days crying in Argentina,” he revealed, in presumably unconscious hommage to Evita.

The plot owed less to Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber than to one of those Fox movies of the early Forties in which some wholesome all-American type escapes the stress and strain of modern life by taking off for a quiet weekend in Latin America, and the next thing you know they’re doing the rhumba on the floor of a Rio nightclub surrounded by Carmen Miranda and 200 gay caballeros prancing around waving giant bananas. In this case, the gentlemen of the South Carolina press were the befuddled caballeros and Governor Sanford was bananas.

There is a rather large point to all this. As my National Review colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez observed, a sex scandal a week from the Republicans will guarantee us government health care by the fall — in the same way that the British Tories’ boundlessly versatile sexual predilections helped deliver the Blair landslide of 1997. And once government health care’s in place the game’s over: Socialized medicine redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in all the wrong ways, and, if you cross that bridge, it’s all but impossible to go back. So, if ever there were a season for GOP philanderers not to unpeel their bananas, this summer is it.

At the press conference, the governor rationalized his unfaithfulness to Mrs. Sanford by saying that he needed to get out of “the bubble.” Tina Brown, proprietrix of The Daily Beast, hooted in derision: “The bubble’s where you’re s’posed to be, Mark. That’s what all the rubber-chicken fundraisers you put her through were for.” But a more basic question is: Why does the minimally empowered executive of a mid-sized state with no particular national prominence need to be in “the bubble” in the first place?

Evidently he is. Much of the charade involved in the scandal arose from the need to throw off his “security detail”: The Chevy Suburban pulling up outside the governor’s mansion; Sanford casually tossing his running shoes, a pair of green shorts, and a sleeping bag in the back; turning off the GPS locator . . . Although staffers kept up his ghostwritten tweet of the day on Twitter, by Monday state senators were revealing that they hadn’t heard from the governor since Thursday.

And we can’t have that, can we?

Even Charles Krauthammer on Fox News professed to be concerned at a governor wandering off incommunicado. What would happen if there was a hurricane or a terrorist attack on South Carolina? Well, I’d imagine that state agencies would muddle through to one degree of competence or another, and that the physical presence of the governor would make absolutely zero difference — any more than, on the day, George Pataki made a difference to New York’s response to 9/11 (good) or Kathleen Blanco to Louisiana’s response to Katrina (abysmal and embarrassing, but deriving from the state’s broader political culture rather than anything Governor Blanco did or didn’t do on the big day). In a republic of limited government, the governor, two-thirds of the state legislature, and the heads of every regulatory agency should be able to go “hiking the Appalachian Trail” for a lot longer than five days, and nobody would notice.

Obama To Hold Job Performance Review With Every American Worker

Iowahawk, as hilarious as ever.

Brian Smalley was laid off by ObamaStickers.com in late April. He didn’t panic. He didn’t rush off to a therapist. Instead, the 33-year-old Santa Monica resident discovered that being jobless “kind of settled nicely, once you get used to the heating grate.”

Week one: “I thought, ‘OK… I need to send out resumes, send some e-mails, need to do networking.”

Week two: “Hide from the landlord.”

Every week since: “I’m going down to the Ralph’s dumpster for free brown bananas.”

What most people would call unemployment, Smalley embraced as “funemployment.” What other people would dismiss as starvation, he whimsically terms a “starve-cation.”

“Economic Depression” once conjured images of tent cities and desperate job-seeking drifters, but for hordes of jobless Gen Xers, there is a silver lining in the new upbeat economic meltdown. These giddily carefree hipsters tend to be single and in their 20s and 30s, happily unencumbered by the obligations of parenthood or teeth.

Buoyed by severance, savings, unemployment checks and free Salvation Army blankets, the nation’s new wave of hip funemployed do not spend their days poring over job listings. With no timeclock to punch, they travel on the cheap for weeks, bartering mix CDs or sterno or sexual favors for a fun cross-country boxcar trip. They study yoga and newspaper journalism, or grab a quick al fresco lunch at the neighborhood soup kitchen bistro. They participate in fun dance marathons and pole-sitting contests. And at least till the bank account dries up and the tuberculosis takes hold, they’re content living for today.

“I feel like I’ve been given a gift of time and clarity,” said Emily Horton, 29, of Austin, Texas. “And sometimes spare change.”

Horton, who was recently laid off from her job as a ElectoChill D.J. at a boutique hotel aromatherapy spa, says lack of a daily job obligation has been “a godsend.”

“I get to sleep in late at the shelter, and I finally have time to catch up on Tweeting,” she says. As she recently mused on Twitter, from an Austin public library: “Recession? More like relax-cession!”

Read it all.

WSJ:

President Obama has bet the economy on his program to grow the government and finance it with a more progressive tax system. It’s hard to miss the irony that he’s pitching this change in Washington even as the same governance model is imploding in three of the largest American states where it has been dominant for years — California, New Jersey and New York.

A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

These states have been models of “progressive” policies that are supposed to create wealth: high tax rates on the rich, lots of government “investments,” heavy unionization and a large government role in health care.

Here’s a rundown on the results:

Government spending as economic stimulus. State-local spending per capita is $12,505 in New York (second highest after Alaska), $10,136 per person in California (fourth) and $9,574 in New Jersey (seventh).

Has all this public sector “investment” translated into jobs? Not quite. California had the nation’s third highest jobless rate in May (11.5%). New Jersey and New York had below average unemployment rates in May compared to the national average of 9.4%, but one reason is that so many discouraged workers have left those states. From 1998-2007, which included two booms on Wall Street, New York and New Jersey ranked 36th and 31st in job creation. From 2000 to 2007, the New Jersey Business & Industry Association calculates that nine out of 10 new Garden State jobs were in the government. (more…)

by Burt Prelutsky

I often find myself thinking that if liberals didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.       

For instance, consider the uproar from the left when Don Imus opened his silly yap about the black women on the Rutgers basketball team.  Now compare that to their response when David Letterman made his smarmy cracks about Sarah Palin and the governor’s 14-year-old daughter.  The liberals immediately sprang to his defense, pointing out that Letterman is nothing more than a TV personality and is therefore free to make offensive jokes without fear of censure.  So what do they think Don Imus is?  The secretary of state?

Or consider how choleric those on the left become any time that Dick Cheney defends the former administration.  Well, if Obama and his cronies didn’t constantly attack Bush and Cheney and their policies, the chances are the ex-vice president wouldn’t feel compelled to set the record straight.   Furthermore, Jimmy Carter never stopped bashing George Bush during the eight years he was the president, and yet nobody on the left ever suggested he shut up.  On the contrary, he was hailed at the 2004 Democratic convention, and even had the honor of being seated next to the patron saint of left-wingers, Michael Moore.  Speaking of Carter, how is it that he, who is always volunteering to monitor elections anywhere on earth, including the Westminster Dog Show, wasn’t in Iran, making sure that Ahmadinejad got 110% of the vote?

Liberals never got tired of telling us how much George Bush was despised by those in other countries, although, for the record, I kept asking the loons to name those countries, but could never prompt a response.  I assume even they were too embarrassed to mention Iran, North Korea, China, Yemen and Russia.  Instead, they kept insisting that America should be more like Europe.  Inasmuch as conservative politicians are winning elections in England and all over the continent these days, the people finally waking up to the unmitigated disaster socialism is, I could now join in the chorus.  But, of course, so far as leftists are concerned, I’d now be singing a solo.

I have to wonder, though, how much non-Muslim nations trust our current president.  It’s one thing, after all, to travel to other countries and talk a lot of diplomatic flapdoodle, but when Barack Obama takes every opportunity to tell the world how awful we are — or at least how awful we were until he got elected — it has to make people wonder if, like his missus, he had never been proud of America prior to his canonization by the media.

It doesn’t make things a lot better when he makes obviously foolish remarks, such as insisting that the U.S. is one of the largest Muslim nations, and that Muslims played a major role in the creation of our republic.

That one really had me reeling, so I went back to my trusty old history book and looked it up and, sure enough, he was correct.  Right there in black and white, I discovered that among the most influential of the Founding Fathers were Abdullah Washington, Mahmoud Adams and Osama bin Jefferson.