The Washington Post’s editorial board discusses Keystone:

Obama’s Jobs Council reminded the nation that it is still hooked on fossil fuels, and will be for a long time. “Continuing to deliver inexpensive and reliable energy,” the council reported, “is going to require the United States to optimize all of its natural resources and construct pathways (pipelines, transmission and distribution) to deliver electricity and fuel.” It added that regulatory “and permitting obstacles that could threaten the development of some energy projects, negatively impact jobs and weaken our energy infrastructure need to be addressed.” Mr. Obama’s Jobs Council could start by calling out…the Obama administration…

We almost hope this was a political call because, on the substance, there should be no question. Without the pipeline, Canada would still export its bitumen — with long-term trends in the global market, it’s far too valuable to keep in the ground — but it would go to China. And, as a State Department report found, U.S. refineries would still import low-quality crude — just from the Middle East. Stopping the pipeline, then, wouldn’t do anything to reduce global warming, but it would almost certainly require more oil to be transported across oceans in tankers.

WaPo columnist Robert Samuelson is a little less diplomatic:

rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it…environmentalists won’t get much. Stopping the pipeline won’t halt the development of tar sands, to which the Canadian government is committed; therefore, there will be little effect on global warming emissions. Indeed, Obama’s decision might add to them. If Canada builds a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific for export to Asia, moving all that oil across the ocean by tanker will create extra emissions. There will also be the risk of added spills…

consider how Obama’s decision hurts the United States. For starters, it insults and antagonizes a strong ally; getting future Canadian cooperation on other issues will be harder. Next, it threatens a large source of relatively secure oil that, combined with new discoveries in the United States, could reduce (though not eliminate) our dependence on insecure foreign oil.

Finally, Obama’s decision forgoes all the project’s jobs. There’s some dispute over the magnitude. Project sponsor TransCanada claims 20,000, split between construction (13,000) and manufacturing (7,000) of everything from pumps to control equipment. Apparently, this refers to “job years,” meaning one job for one year. If so, the actual number of jobs would be about half that spread over two years. Whatever the figure, it’s in the thousands and important in a country hungering for work. And Keystone XL is precisely the sort of infrastructure project that Obama claims to favor.

The big winners are the Chinese. They must be celebrating their good fortune and wondering how the crazy Americans could repudiate such a huge supply of nearby energy.

Speaking of China, Chairman Mao wanted people to put steel mills in their back yards. Very practical. In the new fantasy America we have now, everyone should put a Solyndra in their back yards, and there should be personalized high-speed rail service connecting every home in the country,

Henry Adams reflected on changes in America in about 1904: “The American boy of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Charles Eliot commented on the range of knowledge among some Americans in 1854: “We are accustomed to seeing men leap from farm or shop to court-room or pulpit, and we half believe that common men can safely use the seven-league boots of genius.” Those days are long gone.

As VDH says, and as we have written as well, Americans don’t know much about the world that existed in the days of Adams and Eliot. The world seems magic now, because of technology; it hardly was magic back then.

The ignorance is not just sad, it’s actually perilous. To take a mundane example, technology has permitted the elimination of inventory everywhere in the global supply chain. How large are the buffer inventories of gasoline, fruits and vegetables, meat, canned goods, and so forth, in case some serious disruptions should occur? A month or two, like the SPR? What happens when the gas and the cheeseburgers run out after that?

Charles Eliot advocated a new curriculum in higher education that focused on specialization. This time in our view would benefit by more respect for the generalist of 1854. It is colossally arrogant to think that there will not be a breakdown in the supply chain at some point. And the consequences of arrogance are not pretty. If there’s a Plan B for the US in such a crisis, we haven’t heard of it. And offshoring so much of America’s needs to foreign lands heightens the risks in our perilous present.

Charleston wants to deepen its port by 5 feet. George Will:

The first container ship reached Charleston in 1966, carrying 600 containers. Today the port receives ships carrying more than 9,000. By 2014 there will be 1,200 “post-Panamax” ships — marvels of naval architecture, floating mountains — built for commerce after the canal widening. They will carry up to 18,000 containers. The widening, says Jim Newsome, CEO of the South Carolina State Ports Authority, will be “the biggest game-changer in the history of containerization”…70 percent of imports from Asia arrive at West Coast ports and are distributed inland by truck and rail. But shipping is the cheapest transportation per mile and will become cheaper with post-Panamax ships, including those coming here.

Newsome says the study for deepening Savannah’s harbor was made in 1999. It is 2012, and studies for the environmental impact statement are not finished. When they are, the project will take five years to construct. “But before that,” he says laconically, “they’re going to be sued by groups concerned about the environmental impact.” A Newsome axiom — that institutions become risk-averse as they get challenged — is increasingly pertinent as America changes from a nation that celebrated getting things done to a nation that celebrates people and groups who prevent things from being done.

Newsome says that because of labor costs — in constructing and crewing ships — America has essentially no deep-sea shipping industry. This is a facet of the de-industrialization of the nation.

The world’s tallest building took 14 months to build in 1930 in NYC. Now the same task takes at least 10x as long in NYC — if they’re lucky. How pathetic.

Some of the following thoughts were originally written five years ago, before the mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps and a certain vicious cycle almost brought down the banking system in the wake of the disastrous decision to let Lehman Brothers fail. With the subsequent (profitable) bank bailouts in 2008, the US dodged a bullet that it did not in 1930, when a recession became a depression. Letting the banks fail was the great folly at the onset of the great depression. It’s not just our contention. Read the Milton Friedman excerpt below.

Many years ago we had the good fortune to meet a man who was present as a child at one of the precipitating events of the Great Depression, the failure of New York’s Bank of the United States in December 1930. His grandfather, who lost his savings in that bank, took him to witness the scene as depositors thronged to bank doors that were locked during normal business hours. The panic from bank failures in New York and elsewhere spread around the country — there was no deposit insurance — driving banks to maximize liquidity, sell assets, foreclose loans, and create the Mother of All Credit Crunches, which became known as the Great Depression. Here’s how the NYT described the scene in its December 12, 1930 city edition:

Perhaps you have been taught that the stock market crash of 1929 caused the Great Depression. That is not so. The crash both reflected and amplified the recession that the US economy was entering in 1929; however, it was the problems of the banking system and of monetary policy that cascaded recession into depression. We will quote from Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History of the United States (from pp. 309-313):

The stock market crash…left no mark on currency held by the public. Its direct financial effect was confined to the stock market and did not arouse any distrust of banks by their depositors.

The stock market crash coincided with a stepping up of the rate of economic decline. During the two months from the cyclical peak in August 1929 to the crash, production, wholesale prices, and personal income fell at annual rates of 20%, 7.5%, and 5%, respectively. In the next twelve months, all three series fell at appreciably higher rates…Even if the contraction had come to an end in late 1930 or early 1931, as it might have done in the absence of the monetary collapse that was to ensue, it would have ranked as one of the more severe contractions on record….

In October 1930, the monetary character of the contraction changed dramatically…A crop of bank failures, particularly in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Arkansas, and North Carolina, led to widespread attempts to convert demand and time deposits into currency…A contagion of fear spread among depositors…such contagion knows no geographical limits. The failure of 256 banks with $180 million in deposits in November 1930 was followed by the failure of 352 with over $370 million of deposits in December…the most dramatic being the failure on December 11 of the Bank of the United States with over $200 million of deposits.

That failure was of especial importance. The Bank of the United States was the largest commercial bank, as measured by volume of deposits, ever to have failed up to that time in US history. Moreover, though an ordinary commercial bank, its name had led many at home and abroad to regard it as somehow an official bank, hence its failure constituted more of a blow to confidence than would have been administered by the fall of a bank with a less distinctive name.

In addition it was a member of the Federal Reserve System. The withdrawal of support by the Clearing House banks from the concerted measures sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to save the bank — measures of a kind the banking community had often taken in similar circumstances in the past — was a serious blow to the System’s prestige…

Friedman implies that the reason that the Clearing House banks failed to bail out the Bank of the United States, despite often intervening in other, similar cases, is that the BoUS’s customer base and board were Jewish. This contention seems to be supported by statements from the NY State Banking Commissioner of that time, Joseph A. Broderick (p. 310). Let’s take a look at how the New York Times reported the attendees of the meeting the day before the Clearing House pulled the plug on the Bank of the United States:

We have no way of knowing if Milton Friedman’s contention is true or not, though it appears likely to us that, unlike Herbert H. Lehman, the “small, able” Mr. Isidor J. Kresel was probably not a member of Our Crowd. TIME Magazine summed up the banking community’s view of the Bank of the United States in its December 22, 1930 issue on that fateful meeting:

Another late arrival was lanky Owen D. Young who came about 11 p.m. in full dress, accompanied by Thomas William Lamont of J. P. Morgan & Co. Looking taller than usual in his full dress, Mr. Young paused to peer down at and converse with small, able Isidor Kresel, counsel for Bank of United States…Conservative Manhattan bankers last week were angry at Bernard K. Marcus, dark-haired, heavily-built president of Bank of United States. His aim was perhaps much too high. Only last year he stated: “Often we’ve put two or three days work into one. We have gone ahead two or three times as fast as we would have had we been working only one day at a time.” To bankers, a day’s work is a day’s work, to be done well, thoroughly.

(The tall and lanky in full dress versus the small, able, dark-haired, overreaching, and heavily-built. We get the picture. Thanks, TIME.) This piece has been quite educational to research. We see once again that great events can turn on small episodes of human weakness, prejudice and folly. And who knew at the time that a crowd gathered at a bank on a cold December day would become anything other than the “local” event that the head of the NY Clearing House opined that it would be?

We should not believe that we can’t make mistakes of similar magnitude or wrongheadedness again. The stagflation of the 1970′s was caused by foolish economics policies of three presidents in a row — Nixon, Ford, and Carter — that weren’t reversed for a decade until Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker had the wisdom and courage to take the harsh steps required to kill inflation. The greatest folly can seem trivial or reasonable at the time, which is precisely why it is so dangerous. Fortunately, even many of the people who rhetorically blast TARP today, chose to back it when push came to shove.

AP:

“China is expecting foreign trade growth to slow this year to around 10 percent amid a grim outlook for exports…Last year, China’s foreign trade grew 22.5 percent to $3.6 trillion…exports in December rose 13.4 percent, down slightly from November’s growth rate.” And from Bloomberg, “Growth may ‘trough’ at 7.5 percent in the three months through March and 7.6 percent in the second quarter.”

As China’s growth slows, the problems will become more obvious. The overleverage problem. The housing bust. The political fissures. The issues that PPP obscures. The urban unemployment problem. The regional governments problem. The empty cities problem. Stay tuned.

NYT:

When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law…the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist…while it may seem harsh that the Environmental Protection Agency is penalizing them for failing to do the impossible, the agency is being lenient by the standards of the law, the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act…

The goal set by the law for vehicle fuel from cellulose was 250 million gallons for 2011 and 500 million gallons for 2012. (These are small numbers relative to the American fuel market; the E.P.A. estimates that gasoline sales in 2012 will amount to about 135 billion gallons, and highway diesel, about 51 billion gallons.)

Note the date: 2007. It’s a bi-partisan clownfest, raising costs and complicating business in service of a trivial amelioration of an imaginary problem. Fortunately, there’s not a single shred of evidence that over-regulating the private sector hurts job creation.

IBD:

According to the BLS, the “labor force participation rate” — the ratio of the number of people either working or looking for work compared with the entire working-age population — is now 64%, down from 65.7% when the recession ended in June 2009. That’s the lowest level since women began entering the workforce in far greater numbers several decades ago. If you adjust for this drop, the unemployment rate would be close to 11%, instead of the official 8.5%.

Of course this has been the case for a long time now. Imagine how the media would be reporting unemployment, and indeed, will be reporting unemployment, if the White House changes hands this year.

VDH:

Obama made several recess appointments — a tactic that as a senator he once criticized — even though Congress was not in recess. In December, the president signed a $1 billion omnibus spending bill, but notified Congress that he might not abide by some of the very provisions he had just signed into law. During the Libya war, Obama felt that bombing Qaddafi’s forces did not really constitute military operations, and therefore he had no need to notify Congress under the War Powers Act. It is clear that Arizona is not trying to circumvent federal immigration law, but rather is desperately trying to find some way to enforce it, given that the Obama administration has selectively chosen not to do so. In response, the federal government is suing the state of Arizona, even as it assures illegal aliens that they will not be arrested if they have not committed a crime — as if Obama can by himself decide that illegally entering and residing in the United States is not a federal crime in the first place. President Obama argued that it was constitutional to force citizens to purchase federalized health care, and that all Americans would be subject to his new health-care law — except some 2,000 businesses and organizations that were given politically driven waivers. Obama decided to reverse the legal order of creditors in the bailout of a bankrupt Chrysler Corporation in favor of more politically suitable constituencies. The administration does not like the Defense of Marriage Act, and therefore announced that it won’t enforce it. When a federal judge struck down an Obama- administration ban on new leases for gas and oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama for a time ignored the injunction. When a BP oil leak in the Gulf outraged America, the president met with company executives and announced that they had agreed to set up a $20 billion “fund” to pay for imminent damage claims — as if our chief executive now meets with culpable private businesses to assess what he thinks they should pony up to avoid federal retaliation…

on any given challenge Obama assesses the politics of favoring his constituency of the “poor” and “middle class,” and then uses the necessary legal gymnastics post facto to offer the veneer of lawfulness. If someone is breaking a federal “law” by entering Arizona illegally from Mexico, there must be a way to make the enforcer of that “law” the real suspect — given that a Sheriff Joe Arpaio is by allegiance of the privileged 1 percent and those whom he arrests most surely are not. Consumers are deemed to need federal help more than do lenders; accordingly, Congress “really” is now in recess. In other words, we are witnessing with this administration the ancient idea of the supposedly exalted ends justifying the somewhat ambiguous means — albeit dressed up in trendy Ivy League legalese and progressive moralizing. Our postmodern president is not content with just picking and choosing which laws he will follow in advancing his social agenda. The war against the myth of disinterested Western jurisprudence extends also to free-market economics, as we see with the monotonous demonization of the so-called 1 percent and those who make over $200,000 per year. Sometime after January 2009, we learned that the “wealthy” did not gain their riches by a wide variety of what we once thought were legitimate means — luck, inheritance, work, health, intelligence, expertise, experience, education, or an overriding desire for money and status, coupled with an avoidance of classical sins like sloth, crime, and drunkenness. Rather, we were taught that there was something else going on, something innately unfair in the manner in which we are arbitrarily compensated. In some sense, we are back to the old notion of a labor theory of value (e.g., an hour of working at Starbucks is inherently no less valuable to our society in terms of how much the worker should be paid than an hour crafting a deal at Goldman Sachs). The role, then, of government is not to ensure an equality of opportunity — which is impossible, given inherent and unending race, class, and gender exploitations — but to strive for an equality of result. That utopian task demands that the best and the brightest in government redistribute capital, or rather use the state to make right what the private sector has distorted.

And this from the head of one of our political parties: “The discourse in America, the discourse in Congress in particular…has really changed, I’ll tell you. I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it take a very precipitous turn towards edginess and lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement.” Already, “the Department of Homeland has been operating a ‘Social Networking/Media Capability’ program to monitor the top blogs, forums and social networks online for at least the past 18 months.” Hard to imagine what 2013-2017 America is going to look like if these folks aren’t shown the door.

The WSJ discusses Bain Capital’s investments:

22% either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses. An additional 8% ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost…Bain produced about $2.5 billion in gains for its investors in the 77 deals, on about $1.1 billion invested. Overall, Bain recorded roughly 50% to 80% annual gains in this period, which experts said was among the best track records for buyout firms

Here are a few thoughts on the non-VC PE industry. KKR was started in 1976. and initally capitalized on low stock market valuations to take companies private at very low EBITDA multiples. Excellent idea. Around the same time the mainstreaming of hostile takeovers by Morgan Stanley’s Bob Greenhill and attorney Joe Flom meant that a going-private transaction did not have to be voluntary. (We once attended a meeting with a public company director who pleaded that we find someone to do a hostile takeover of his company because the CEO was so awful.)

The emergence of Mike Milken’s junk bonds in the 1980′s accelerated going-private transactions. In addition, acquirors had the ability to allocate basis among subsidiaries of the acquiree (“mirrors“) so that they paid no taxes on the operations they sold off to pay down debt. An attorney famous for defending targets of the takeovers called them junk-bond, bust-up, bootstrap deals. These developments arguably contributed to CEO’s being better stewards of public company assets. Bain Capital was founded in 1984, towards the end of the first phase of large PE deals. It looks as though the firm did start-up and growth capital deals at first and migrated into troubled situations sometimes referred to as vulture capital.

We’ve never done business with Bain Capital, though we’ve been involved as an agent and principal in the PE business for several decades. It has been our general observation that bankers and finance guys generally don’t know too much about business operations, but business operations get translated into numbers, and they know the numbers. It has surprised us that PE has been portrayed as both the Second Coming and the Devil’s Spawn by elements within the GOP. It’s neither of course.

We agree that the young-rich know-nothing banker with his 2+20 cap-gains-on-the-carry compensation scheme creates an image issue. But there’s this on the other side after all. As MoDo wrote, “a prospective race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is being caricatured here as ‘Saul Alinsky versus Gordon Gekko’.” We agree with roughly 50% of that.

A fansite report from 2009 describes a splashy party at the WH that the national media ignored:

Depp & Burton Attend Whitehouse Halloween Party ~- President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama on Saturday handed out treats to more than 2,000 trick-or-treaters, marking their Halloween at a White House event partly aimed at honoring military families. Johnny Depp & Tim Burton were amoung the attendess at the Whitehouse Halloween Party and apparently Johnny was very popular with the children because of his Jack Sparrow character from Pirates Of The Caribbean. It is not known yet if Depp & Burton dressed up for the Party but we do know there was some characters from The Night Before Christmas and apparently a tea party with the Mad Hatter….could this have been Johnny Depp?

(Since this report came from a dedicated fansite, it missed or overlooked Chewbacca’s attendance at the fancy party.) This tiny story serves to illustrate that the media are even more pathetic, unprofessional and subservient than we thought.

CBS Chicago:

A new state law requires those who buy drain cleaners and other caustic substances to provide photo identification and sign a log…The law came about after two Illinois women were burned by acid attacks back in 2008. One of the women later admitted to burning herself with acid, but the law was still pushed through…so, because of one random crime where acid was used to burn a victim, thousands of people will be forced to show identification when they purchase drain cleaners, and countless hours of business time will be spent filling out, maintaining and monitoring the government mandated forms associated with each purchase.

The law creates good government jobs, creating and reading forms and prosecuting those who fail to file the proper forms! But shouldn’t the DOJ be suing Illinois, since the law is discriminatory? Wait a second, that lawsuit creates good government jobs too for the lawyers on both sides. Hmmm. Maybe photo ID’s should be required for every commercial transaction in the United States. Unemployment could be completely eliminated, right?

Pete Ferrara in Forbes:

The big money Republican establishment was behind Bush because they feared that Reagan was too radical to win, and would carry the entire party down to historic defeat, like Goldwater did. Reagan even lost Iowa to Bush on that argument. But Reagan carried forward the pro-growth economic message that ultimately swept him to the nomination, and then to landslide victory in the fall, his coattails handing the Republicans control of the Senate, and effective control of the House.

After two Reagan landslide wins, it took George Bush just one term to trash the Reagan coalition, crawling out of town in 1992 with just 38% of the vote, barely better than Alf Landon in 1936…Since 1896, only Republicans who have campaigned on a pro-growth platform have been elected. Mitt Romney, instead of being the most electable, is firmly in the tradition of Thomas Dewey, Jerry Ford, Bob Dole, and John McCain.

Hmmm. Very interesting historical analogies, but how about Nixon versus McGovern in the election of 1972 with McGovern as the incumbent. What a thought! And here’s Sean Trende’s interesting analysis.

George Will:

In 2009, the net worth of households headed by adults ages 65 and older was a record 47 times that of households headed by adults under the age of 35 — a wealth gap that doubled just since 2005. The equalizing effects of redistributive transfer payments are less today than in 1979, when households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of such payments. In 2007, they received 36 percent.

It’s as though we have an intergenerational Treaty of Versailles, and the young are stuck with the war reparations. The problem is: there aren’t enough of the young to do so. Trouble ahead.

VDH discusses the military budget:

The drawdown is not occurring in a vacuum, but is the bookend of a loud new ‘reset’ / ‘lead from behind’ strategy that deprecates traditional allies like Britain and Israel while failing miserably in outreach to supposedly new neutrals like Syria and Iran — all in a landscape of bowing, apologizing, and Cairo speechifying. All of these developments serve as force multipliers to the military retrenchment and confirm the impression of our enemies that the world is now entirely negotiable in a way not true four years ago.

The unspoken irony is that the military and our anti-terrorism protocols served Obama well when he arrived: he found a quiet Iraq with almost no monthly American casualties, a decimated al Qaeda (largely destroyed in Iraq), anti-terrorism measures that had foiled over 30 plots against the mainland (and were all demagogued by candidate Obama before President Obama embraced them), major powers like China, Russia, and Iran wary of pressing the U.S., allies like Japan, Taiwan, Germany, and South Korea secure under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and the most seasoned and experienced U.S. military in generations…

The new $500 billion cuts must be considered against the nearly $5 trillion Obama has borrowed since assuming office, in addition to what he will borrow this next year. A defense budget that was tolerable prior to 2008 becomes apparently unsustainable with expenditures for Obamacare, vast new green projects like Solyndra, expansions in food stamps and unemployment insurance, and vast increases in the size of the non-military federal government. At least with the military our money earns safety and deterrence

The college professor continues his work. It’s as though the country elected not Jimmy Carter, but George McGovern. In any event the choice couldn’t be clearer this year. An America that might choose a McGovern administration is both unfathomable to us and, sadly, possible.

Recess appointments when the Senate’s not in recess? Sure, why not? These guys are committed and disciplined. And if the media don’t care, why should you?

Andrew Malcolm, witnessing the same stump speech for the hundredth time. IBD:

out of the blue Wednesday, came a tiny incident. A minute moment. There had been no signs of trouble, nothing to reveal that the Real Good Talker’s real good talking had lost his touch or control of his sitting subjects. The rest of the speech continued normally. Many there probably didn’t even notice. The president of the United States has said the next line so many times over these 1,080 days of his reign. He says it as a kind of democratic gesture, a compliment to a crowd of American citizens, a public obeisance that the most powerful man in the world is profoundly connected to them. Obama said, “You inspire me.” And you know how the members of that crowd in the most Democratic district of Ohio responded to that campaigning Democratic president’s professed sincerity this time? They laughed at him.

We’ve been told by our leftish political reporter acquaintances that while John Edwards’ Two Americas speech sounded great the first time, after a few times of listening to a PI lawyer give his sincere-sounding summation for the jury, their eyes would begin to roll. They were wise to his act and they’d begin to mimic and mock Edwards’ practiced cadences and faux-emotional pauses. Now there’s another guy that everybody’s heard one too many times.

Michael Barone:

Franklin D. Roosevelt…served seven years as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Wilson administration and four years as Governor of New York. But many considered him a lightweight, profiting on the fact that he was a distant cousin (his wife Eleanor was a closer cousin) of Theodore Roosevelt, a president considered great enough at that time to be worthy of being depicted on Mount Rushmore and the winner of the largest percentage of the popular vote for president of any candidate between 1820 and 1920. Theodore Roosevelt had written several impressive books (his account of the naval War of 1812 is still considered authoritative) before he was elected president and had resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to serve in combat in the Spanish American war at age 39. Franklin Roosevelt had written no books before 1932 and had stayed in the same civilian post rather than enlist at 38 when the United States entered World War I.

Franklin Roosevelt was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1920 when the ticket lost by a 60%-34% margin to the Republican ticket of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and Roosevelt nearly lost the 1928 governor election to Republican Albert Ottinger. Few journalists espied greatness in him. He was “Roosevelt Minor” to Mencken, who wrote, “No one, in fact, really likes Roosevelt, not even his ostensible friends, and no one quite trusts him.” Walter Lippmann, who supported the Democratic party as editorial page editor of the New York World in the 1920s, and who had known Roosevelt for more than a dozen years, described him as “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president”…

The 2012 Republican field does indeed look weak, at a time of great opportunity for the party. But so did the 1932 Democratic field. We can try to learn as much about these candidates as we can, but we cannot foresee the future. We must hope that at least one of these candidates turns out to have greater strengths and virtues than are now apparent. It’s happened before.

We understand that Mitt Romney won in Iowa by 8 votes, at least as of this writing. Meanwhile, “43% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Republican in their district’s congressional race if the election were held today, while 38% would choose the Democrat instead.” We continue to have the feeling that, although the GOP generally seems to be well positioned, and the conventional wisdom is now that Romney is the odds on favorite to be the nominee, some enormous surprises lie ahead. We’ll see.

Washington Times:

requiring a high school diploma from a job applicant might violate the Americans with Disabilities Act…The “informal discussion letter” from the EEOC said an employer’s requirement of a high school diploma, long a standard criterion for screening potential employees, must be “job-related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity”…Employers could run afoul of the ADA if their requirement of a high school diploma “‘screens out’ an individual who is unable to graduate because of a learning disability

Fortunately there’s “not a single shred of evidence” that government regulations are harmful.

Robert Reich:

today’s tea party is less an ideological movement than the latest incarnation of an angry white minority — predominantly Southern, mainly rural, largely male — that has repeatedly attacked American democracy while trying to get its way. It’s no coincidence that the states responsible for putting the most tea party representatives in the House are the former members of the Confederacy. Others are from border states with significant Southern populations and Southern ties. This “no-compromise” right wing of today’s GOP isn’t much different from the evangelical social conservatives who began asserting themselves in the party during the 1990s and, before them, the “Willie Horton” conservatives of the 1980′s…America has had a long history of white Southerners who will stop at nothing to get their way: seceding from the Union in 1861, refusing to obey civil rights legislation in the 1960s

The worthies of the left actually believe this. It’s very peculiar after all this time that they continue to do so. The Telegraph attended one of the angry mob scenes. So did Glenn Reynolds. And of course there’s that noted Southern rural redneck Rick Santelli. And the “angry white men” that Reich imagines, um, they’re reportedly more than half women.

NY Post:

Columbia University is offering a new course on Occupy Wall Street next semester — sending upperclassmen and grad students into the field for full course credit. The class is taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, who boasts about her nights camped out in Zuccotti Park. As many as 30 students will be expected to get involved in ongoing OWS projects outside the classroom, the syllabus says. The class will be in the anthropology department and called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement.” It will be divided between seminars at the Morningside Heights campus and fieldwork.

From the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University:

Hannah Appel earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. With research interests in the daily life of capitalism and the private sector in Africa, in particular, Hannah’s work draws on critical development studies, economic anthropology, and political economy. Her current project — Futures — is baded on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the transnational oil and gas industry in Equatorial Guinea. The project explores the considerable work required to lubricate the passage of oil to market – not only of labor (whether manual, managerial, or domestic,) but also of material infratstructures, contracting regimes, and forms of governance and regulation. What combinations of technopolitics, labor, infrastructure, contracts and subcontracts, corporate enclaves and corporate social responsibility programs are required to convert Equatorial Guinea’s hydrocarbon from subsea deposit to spot price on the New York Mercantile Exchange? And to what effect?

Is this guy, a Columbia grad student, going to help teach the course?