Last month, Paul McCartney, excuse me, Sir Paul McCartney made a crack about Bush not being a reader.

Obama gets passed off as an intellectual. But guess what?

Karl Rove once claimed that President George W. Bush read 95 books in a year as part of a bet.

Apparently, President Obama is not as well read.

Reporter Michael Powell to the Columbia Journalism Review: “I got talking to him about what he reads and was telling me about these different policy tomes. And I said, ‘Well, yeah, but come on. I’m out here on the campaign trail with you, you’re up even earlier than I am, and I’ve been carrying around this Philip Roth book with me for two months and I’m yet to even crack it.’ He actually laughed at that point, and said, ‘Yeah, you have very little chance to really read. I basically floss my teeth and watch Sports Center.’”

In footage captured on a passenger’s mobile phone, she is seen hurling pillows around the cabin after being bombarded by playful French tourists.

After one particularly heavy onslaught, the grinning stewardess flees to the safety of the galley, to the cheers and the applause of economy class.

Michael Barone:

“The pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated.” Those were the carefully chosen words of the Federal Reserve Board after its meeting Tuesday. Translation into English: We wuz wrong.

So were a lot of people, including departing White House economics adviser Christina Romer, who wrote that the Obama Democrats’ February 2009 stimulus package would hold unemployment below 8 percent.

It wasn’t just administration spokesmen who expected a solid recovery. California economist Bill Watkins in newgeography.com recalls a conference last fall in which all the other economists presented rosy scenarios and only he forecast extended malaise. He was relieved that his colleagues didn’t pelt him with tomatoes.

It’s easy for Republicans to make partisan hay of all this. They can point out, as Bush administration economist Larry Lindsey does in the Weekly Standard, that the congressional Democrats’ stimulus package was not the timely, targeted and temporary measure recommended by national economic director Larry Summers.

They can add that the threat of pending regulations interpreting the health care and financial regulation bills and of pending tax increases as the Bush cuts expire have created a climate of uncertainty in which consumers don’t consume, banks don’t lend and businesses don’t create jobs.

All true. But in this summer of unrecovery, it’s still important to understand how so many smart people got so much so wrong.

One answer comes from economist Arnold Kling writing for american.com. Kling argues that the collapse of the housing market and the financial crisis disrupted what had been “a sustainable pattern of specialization and trade” and that we need to let the market economy develop a new one.

Instead, the policies of the Obama Democrats have been aimed at propping up the old order — holding up housing prices and the mortgage market, keeping the Detroit auto companies in place, maintaining the lush standard of living of public employee union members (the purpose of the $26 billion the House was summoned back to Washington to approve Tuesday).

Maintaining unsustainable patterns of production, Kling writes, prevents the trial-and-error process of private investment that creates new jobs and patterns of production that will be sustainable.

Tim Graham at Newsbusters bring us this exchange between Howard Fineman of Newsweek (the magazine that just sold for $1.00, less than its cover price) on the Laugra Ingraham show.

INGRAHAM: How is it though with all these smart people at Newsweek – I went around the block with Evan Thomas about this as well. How did you all think that a guy who basically went from the Harvard Law Review, to some community leafleting, organizing, whatever you want to call it, to a short stint, a few lectures about constitutional law at [the University of] Chicago, very short stopover in the state Senate, and a very short stopover in the U.S. Senate. How does that add up to experience to run the biggest economy and the biggest military in the world? And why wasn’t Newsweek, instead of doing these celebrified covers of Michelle and Barack as historic, and celebrity culture, and all this love-love-love-love-love, why wasn’t – Why weren’t those questions asked before this election took place? Because to me, those were the questions to ask. . It wasn’t about personality. It was about experience and outlook.

FINEMAN: Well, uh, first, I’ll plead nolo [contendere] on a lot of this. But –

INGRAHAM: That’s what he did, in the U.S. Senate. He voted present. So you’re voting present for Newsweek.

FINEMAN: No, no. Part of the problem is, or part of the reason is that we – as political reporters, we become enamored with the mechanics of the campaign, and I would still insist that –

Ingraham saw right through the admire-your-mechanics trope:

INGRAHAM: You’re gonna do that if Paul Ryan is the nominee, for the Republicans? You’re gonna celebrify him? I don’t think so.

FINEMAN: No, no. Let me back up for a second. That was – Whatever you say about Barack Obama and David Axelrod in your diaries and everything –

INGRAHAM: Yeah.

FINEMAN – It was a brilliantly run campaign. And I have come to despair of the notion of the relationship between the quality and shrewdness of a campaign that someone runs and the kind of presidency that they have.

When Ingraham joked that Lady Gaga is good at branding, too, Fineman added; “We were mystified and mesmerized by the quality of the branding campaign that was Obama’s.”

Another word for “mystified and mesmerized” would be that Newsweek was “suckered,” or “bamboozled,” or to use an Ingraham favorite, “razzle-dazzled.” But they knew he would be an inexperienced president, and make plenty of mistakes. They just calculated that they would cross that bridge when they arrived at it. “History” came first, incompetence afterwards.

When the media offers a contender like Obama yards and yards of gauzy press coverage, and when it papers over every inconvenient truth about his hate-preaching minister of two decades, among many contentious fractions of the candidate’s personal history, isn’t it much easier to portray his campaign as “brilliantly run”?

Meteor shower, that is.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

When the Perseid meteor shower peaks in the wee hours of an August Friday morning, Peter Brown & Co. will be ready.

No lawn chairs and hot-chocolate-filled thermoses here to keep meteor-shower observers happy.

Instead, Dr. Brown’s team is using a new optical device it’s developed for tracking meteors with unprecedented detail, pinpointing them at each spot along their paths through the sky to within about 30 feet.

IN PICTURES: Meteor showers

From the glow of a meteor, the scientists aim to gather information on the chemistry taking place on its surface – reactions energized by the enormous heat that builds on the object as it collides with Earth’s atmosphere.

Welcome to the world of meteor science – alive and well in Europe and Canada and in the midst of a renaissance in the United States after nearly two decades of neglect.

Much of the interest revolves around a need for improved predictions to reduce risks to spacecraft and astronauts on orbit.

But the study of meteors also is helping astronomers answer questions about our solar system, as well as potentially providing a new window on planet formation around other stars.

“Meteor research is a very interdisciplinary area” these days, says Brown, a physics professor and meteor maven at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.

Meteors as cosmic bread crumbs

Meteors may be prime vehicles for delivering some of the organic molecules involved in the emergence of life on Earth. They have become cosmic bread crumbs leading back to the discovery of new sources for meteor shows, beyond the occasional passage of active comets. And some may be direct messengers from nearby stars hosting planets or a dusty disk from which planets are forming.

Spacecraft have detected tiny grains of interstellar dust as the spacecraft and dust flit through the solar system. But about a decade ago, researchers led by New Zealand astronomer Jack Baggaley, at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, reported the radar detection of meteoroids entering Earth’s atmosphere from beyond the solar system. Then the team traced the meteoroids to an interstellar dust streamer coming from Beta Pictoris, a star some 63 light-years away that has planets forming from a disk of dust that surrounds it.

The detection remains unconfirmed and thus contentious, Brown cautions. But if meteoroids of sufficient size do strike Earth’s atmosphere and their appearance could be predicted, scientists could plan campaigns to gather spectral information from the light the meteors emit…

HT: Maggie’s Farm