The Atlantic:

Of all these parts of Obama’s executive order, the loan forgiveness aspect will have the least impact. By moving the timeline from 25 to 20 years, it could be significant in the long run — but it won’t be felt for decades. Remember, 82% of the current student loan debt outstanding was accrued in just the past decade. So it will be at least another 10 years before any of those borrowers have hit the 20-year mark…The monthly impact of the president’s new effort for most Americans paying off college debt will be between $4 and $8

More sleight-of-hand for the innumerate and the gullible. BTW, if this is not a photoshop, this girl needs more than just financial help. (Glenn Reynolds has a simple plan to deal with the debt problem.)

Brent Arends wrote about real estate in China at Marketwatch:

Prices in the major cities have skyrocketed. And newly middle-class investors have piled in. They’ve never seen a housing bust. They assumed it will go on forever. Ten years ago, homes in Shanghai sold for about six times an average family’s income. Today that’s 13 times. Shenzhen has gone from five times to 14 times. These are off-the-charts absurd ratios. This is a bona fide mania…

46 of 70 major cities saw prices stall or decline in September, reports the National Statistical Bureau. As recently as January the number was just 10…You can see a proxy for the Chinese housing bust in the performance on Wall Street of E-House (China) Holdings, a real estate broker with a U.S. listing. The stock has collapsed in a year from $17 to less than $7, and the company recently reported it swung to a second-quarter loss thanks to “tough market conditions.”

The credit bubble is imploding…Total lending has come to about $7.8 trillion. To put this in context, that is twice the entire net government debts of the European so-called “PIIGS” — the troubled countries of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain — put together…

Chinese banking operates in a “twilight zone” of phony accounting and shadow money and it’s all coming apart. “Almost half of all credit creation in China is off balance sheet,” wrote the team at Schroders. They think this situation could unravel “over the next three to six months,” producing a huge crisis with international implications. Most Chinese banks, they predict, will end up as “zombie banks.”

Electricity usage and air traffic have flattened. So there is a significant slowdown in the real economy. China has done huge bank bailouts in the past. Looks like another one is around the corner. However, this does not help with China’s planned conversion to a more consumerist society.

John Podhoretz is getting the vapors over the GOP field. Something similar seems to be going on over at Powerline. For some perspective, let’s flash back to January 2010 and the remarks of a retiring Democratic congressman from Arkansas:

Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home. “I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me’.”

That didn’t work out so well, as you recall, with the 2010 D-to-R pickup far greater than the 54 seats in 1994, and Independents flipping by 33 points. Berry was prescient — one of the seats that flipped had been his.

The election is a year away. Republicans may blow it of course, but they’re not doing so now in our view. Indeed, there is a rather lively discussion taking place, with competing tax plans and so forth. Leading candidates have already said that (a) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and (b) global warming either doesn’t exist or isn’t very important — and the world hasn’t ended. Some observers are even having a little fun with the idea of a Cain/Romney ticket. Relax. There’s plenty of time to panic next year.

CAPA:

The General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC) has cut its official air traffic forecast for 2011 as international passenger and cargo volumes weaken amid deteriorating global economic conditions. It comes as China Eastern Airlines became the first Chinese airline to cancel B787 orders, opting instead for A330s and smaller B737s.

China’s passenger growth forecast has been cut from 13% to 8% this year to 288 million passengers — some 13.4 million fewer passenger than previously anticipated — but up from 267 million last year. The air cargo growth forecast has meanwhile been dramatically slashed from growth of 11.5% to flat in 2011, a repeat of 2008

Meanwhile, there’s this from Bloomberg: “China’s economic expansion will slow to about 7% as stagnating global growth damps exports while new political leaders focus on boosting domestic demand, Pacific Investment Management Co. said.” Anything below 8% growth is said to be a recession in China. (HT: CF)

A quote from February 2009:

we will pursue the housing plan I’m outlining today. And through this plan, we will help between 7 and 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages so they can afford — avoid foreclosure. And we’re not just helping homeowners at risk of falling over the edge; we’re preventing their neighbors from being pulled over that edge, too — as defaults and foreclosures contribute to sinking home values, and failing local businesses, and lost jobs

In the real world, we all know that government-centric tinkering doesn’t work. Even Austan Goolsbee has finally figured that out: “If you look at Cash for Clunkers or the first home buyer tax credit…I don’t think you would do that.” The only thing that works is creating an environment where businesses can thrive, and the administration would have to abandon its ideology to do so. A year ago we were saying the same thing, and it’s only gotten worse since then.

So what do we have the administration doing now? More tinkering, yet again on mortgages, and on student loans too. Result: “Just 21% favor the forgiveness of student loans…18% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing…That’s the lowest level of Strong Approval ever.” Hey, it’s no small achievement to both govern ineffectively and against the will of the people at the same time.

Michael Barone:

On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered “the great disappointment” when it didn’t happen. In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children’s Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn’t, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery. In 1898 the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren’t, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.

A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists. They have an unshakable faith that man-made carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science — which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Einstein’s theory of relativity — but on something very much like religious faith. All the trappings of religion are there.

– Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.

– The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system that will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.

– Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.

– Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.

– Corporate elitists, like General Electric’s Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not too. And if you’re clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.

– Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.

But like the Millerites, the global warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom — and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.

Take a fishbowl and place 10,000 blue marbles in it. Take out just one little blue marble and replace it with a green marble. You have now illustrated to yourself how much additional CO2 has increased in the atmosphere in the last several hundred years. Predicating doom on such a truly trivial event is not science. Barone has explained it very well indeed.

Telegraph:

In Benghazi, on the main square where it all started, they were slaughtering camels in celebration. There they sat, eight of them, feet tied so they could not move, quivering with fear as they were beheaded one by one. As soldiers fired rifles in the air, members of the cheering crowd held up the severed heads as trophies. They daubed their hands in the camel-blood, and gave the V-for-victory sign with dripping fingers. But away from the square, the birthplace of the revolution was not in party mood. The streets were fairly quiet. And in the cafes, people were watching TV pictures -– more graphic than any shown in Britain –- of a bloodied Gaddafi dragged along and beaten, feebly protesting, before a gun was put to his head. The picture then cut to the dead ex-leader being rolled onto the pavement, blood pooling from the back of his skull.

An “inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya”? Time will tell.

Gretchen Morgenson of the NYT talked with Paul Volcker about a speech he gave:

“Three Years Later: Unfinished Business in Financial Reform” was the title…heavy lifting includes addressing capital requirements (make them tough and enforceable), derivatives (make them more standardized and transparent) and auditors (ensure that they are truly independent by rotating them periodically). He also spoke of the perils of institutions that are too large or interconnected to be allowed to fail. Calling this the greatest structural challenge facing the financial system, he said we must shrink the risks these companies pose, “whether by reducing their size, curtailing their interconnections or limiting their activities”…

the potential for problems in the huge industry of money market mutual funds, which operates “in the shadows of the banking system”…Although these funds are typically managed conservatively, he said, they are vulnerable to runs, as occurred when Lehman Brothers collapsed. “Because they are not subject to reserve requirements and capital requirements, they are a point of vulnerability in the system,” he said. “It is really interesting that they did so much lending to European banks. They had to pull back a lot, aggravating the pressures on the European banks.” Money market funds held $2.63 trillion as of last Wednesday, and, Mr. Volcker said, many people mistakenly think that these funds are as safe as bank accounts…

The other area that cries out for change, Mr. Volcker said, is the nation’s mortgage market, now controlled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage giants. “We simply should not countenance a residential mortgage market, the largest part of our capital market, dominated by so-called government-sponsored enterprises,” Mr. Volcker said in his speech. “The financial breakdown was in fact triggered by extremely lax, government-tolerated underwriting standards, an important ingredient in the housing bubble…

it is important that planning proceed now on the assumption that government-sponsored enterprises will no longer be a part of the structure of the market…This is an opportunity to get rid of institutions that shouldn’t exist,” he told me. “You ought to be either public or private; don’t mix up private profit-making opportunities with an institution that is going to be protected by the government but not controlled by it.”

Weren’t these problems and others to have been addressed by a 2,319 page bill that regulates whistleblowers, executive pay, credit card fees, minority hiring, Chinese drywall and Congolese minerals? What, they never got around to the trivial issues of a transparent CDS market, naked short selling, and the issues that Glass-Steagall resolved in 1933?

Solyndra on wheels? Clarice Feldman in AT:

Our tax dollars at work…a half-billion dollar loan (actually $529 million) from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a hybrid toy for the wealthy and/or celebri-licious (like Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the first customers) that, in real world driving, won’t get much better mileage than your average crossover utility vehicle. Not only that, but the cars are manufactured in Finland — that’s right, Finland — and shipped here for sale, where their purchasers will then receive a $7,500 tax credit for buying one (the “cheap” base model starts at $96,895, with the full-zoot Eco Chic model going for a bargain $108,900).

The EPA issued its mileage report on this expensive bit of work: It gets 20 miles to the gallon, about the same mileage as those too frequently demonized domestic SUV’s. Even the Volt gets better performance. Half a billion blown. No Jobs. No environmental benefit. A special tax break to the rich, including De Caprio. Does the administration know where to invest our money or what? Al Gore and Colin Powell are on the wait list for the car.

Big deal. We wish people would quit whining. Sure, these things cost us a half a billion here and a half a billion there. But it’s just money after all.

The VP spoke to 4th graders:

Here in this school, your school, you’ve had a lot of teachers who used to work here, but because there’s no money for them in the city, they’re not working. And so what happens is, when that occurs, each of the teachers that stays have more kids to teach. And they don’t get to spend as much time with you as they did when your classes were smaller. We think the federal government in Washington, D.C., should say to the cities and states, look, we’re going to give you some money so that you can hire back all those people. And the way we’re going to do it, we’re going to ask people who have a lot of money to pay just a little bit more in taxes.

Mark Steyn:

Since 1970, public-school employment has increased ten times faster than public-school enrollment. In 2008, the United States spent more per student on K–12 education than any other developed nation except Switzerland — and at least the Swiss have something to show for it. In 2008, York City School District spent $12,691 per pupil — or about a third more than the Swiss. Slovakia’s total per-student cost is less than York City’s current per-student deficit — and the Slovak kids beat the United States at mathematics

The over-the-top nature of the administration’s rhetoric does indeed suggest that this is mostly about campaign money for 2012.

Las Vegas Review-Journal:

the bard of Searchlight stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate. In front of C-SPAN and everybody, he said — and I’m not making this up — “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs are doing just fine. It’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers”…Is Harry Reid out of his ever-loving mind?…In the two years Reid and President Obama have controlled Washington, government jobs have increased 13.5% to 2.1 million. During that same time, 2.5 million private-sector jobs were lost. The unemployment rate in Las Vegas is 13.6%. The national unemployment rate hangs at 9.1%. But the unemployment rate for government workers sits at a mere 4.7%

The desperate quality of Reid’s falsehoods and those of others in the administration is interesting. It tends to support the allegation that campaign funds from the public sector unions are in short supply and they will make up any crazy thing at all to remedy that.

Their internal polling must be horrendous, approaching Pauline Kael territory. We don’t think we’ve previously seen political commentary from Charlie Daniels or Hank Williams, Jr, for example.

Charles Krauthammer discusses the recent debate in the Washington Post:

Romney’s command was best seen in his takedown of Cain’s 9-9-9 plan. Cain refused to concede the burden to consumers of a national sales tax added on to existing state sales taxes. Doggedly sticking to his point long after it had been undermined, he kept raining down metaphors about apples and oranges. His national sales tax is a solution to a federal problem (a monstrous tax code), he insisted, and therefore irrelevant to any discussion of state sales taxes, which would exist regardless. It took Romney one sentence to expose the sophistry.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Post: “The Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group, has praised Cain’s proposal as ‘both pro-growth and a good starting point on the way to a flat or fair tax’…Romney, in contrast, has proposed a 59-point economic plan.” Whatever you think of Cain, 9-9-9 is not sophistry, it is marketing.

Robert Samuelson in the WaPo:

it’s called the Affordable Care Act, and boosters argue that it will subdue runaway spending. It almost certainly won’t. One prominent skeptic is Arnold Relman, the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Writing in The New York Review of Books, Relman says that “the law does very little or nothing to address some of the most important causes of the high cost of care and its rapid inflation.” Note: Relman isn’t a conservative crank. He’s a critic of insurance companies and advocates a single-payer, government-run health-care system.

The ACA, Relman writes, doesn’t alter fee-for-service reimbursement that gives “all physicians strong financial incentives to provide more services than needed.” The resulting “fragmentation of medical care … allows specialists to practice in isolation without restraints on cost, causes duplication and disorganization of services, and discourages the use of primary care physicians.”

Relman is unimpressed with the ACA provisions intended to control costs: for example, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). It’s a group of 15 experts who would recommend changes if government health spending rose too rapidly.

“However, the law stipulates that the IPAB cannot reduce Medicare benefits or increase Medicare premiums, and it defers any proposed reductions in payments to hospitals for a few years,” Relman writes. The IPAB would mainly cut physicians’ Medicare reimbursement rates, he says. But doctors could “easily” offset these cuts “by providing more services, such as performing more diagnostic tests.”

Relman also dismisses “accountable care organizations” (ACOs) that supposedly save money through coordinated care by doctors and hospitals. The regulations governing ACOs will be so complicated that there won’t be many of them

This was obvious more than two years ago, and yet so many people played along at that time. Pity that more people on the left weren’t writing things like this in the NY Review back in 2009.

NY Magazine:

“If you don’t want to be part of this group, then you can just leave,” yelled a facilitator in a button-down shirt, “Every week we clean our house.” Seth Harper, the pro-drummer proletarian, chimed in on the side of the sitters. “We disagree on how we should clean it. A lot of us disagree with the pile.”

Zetah, tall and imposing with a fiery red beard, closed debate with a sigh. “We’re all big boys and girls. Let’s do this.” As he told me afterwards, “A lot of people are like spoiled children.” The cure? A cold snap. “Personally, I cannot wait for winter. It will clear out these people who aren’t here for the right reasons. Bring on the snow. The real revolutionaries will stay in -50 degrees.”

“The sunshine protestors will leave,” said “Zonkers,” a 20-year-old cleaner and longtime occupier from Tennessee. (He asked that his name not be used due to a felony marijuana conviction.) “The people who remain are the people who care. You get a lot of crust punks, silly kids, people who want to panhandle … It disgusts me. These people are here for a block party.”

Another argument broke out next to the pile of appropriated belongings, growing taller by the minute. A man named Sage Roberts desperately rifled through the pile, looking for a sleeping bag. “They’ve taken my stuff,” he muttered. Lauren Digion, the sanitation group leader, broke in: “This isn’t your stuff. You got all this stuff from comfort [the working group]. It belongs to comfort.”

And as I spoke to Michael Glaser, a 26-year-old Chicagoan helping lead winter preparation efforts, a physical fight broke out between a cleaner and a camper just feet from us. “When cleanups happen, people get mad,” Glaser said. “This is its own city. Within every city there are people who freeload, who make people’s lives miserable. We just deal with it. We can’t kick them out.”

As some guy said: “The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side.” Pathetic.

IBD says that

based on the number of toxic loans in the system in 2008, the government was responsible for not just a simple majority, but more than two-thirds. It’s quantifiable — 71% to be exact. And the remaining 29% of private-label junk was mostly attributable to Countrywide Financial, which was under the heel of HUD and its ‘fair-lending’ edicts.

So should OWS instead Occupy Fannie and Freddie, GSE’s that you will recall were totally out of control in the last decade and responsible for much of today’s mess? Turnabout is fair play, we suppose.

Why it is the responsibility of the federal taxpayer to pay for the local police force in Flint, Michigan? These people are sounding a bit desperate these days, aren’t they? 383 more days of this transparent rubbish continues to be hard to imagine.

Art Laffer in the WSJ:

Cain’s now famous “9-9-9″ plan is his explicit proposal to right the wrongs of our federal tax code. He proposes a 9% flat-rate personal income tax with no deductions except for donations to charity; a 9% flat-rate tax on net business profits; and a new 9% national tax on retail sales.

Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan was designed to be what economists call “static revenue neutral,” which means that if people didn’t change what they do under his plan, total tax revenues would be the same as they are under our current tax code. I believe his plan would indeed be static revenue neutral, and with the boost it would give to economic growth it would bring in even more revenue than expected.

In the recent past, federal tax revenues from the personal and business income taxes, all payroll taxes, and the capital gains, gift and estate taxes have averaged $2.3 trillion, while gross domestic product has averaged about $14.5 trillion. The total revenue from these taxes as a share of gross domestic product averages around 16%. Sometimes it’s a good deal higher, as in the boom of the late 1990s, and sometimes its lower, as in today’s “Great Recession.” But a number in the 16%-19% range is as good as you’ll get under our current tax code.

By contrast, the three tax bases for Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan add up to about $33 trillion. But the plan exempts from any tax people below the poverty line. Using poverty tables, this exemption reduces each tax base by roughly $2.5 trillion. Thus, Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 tax base for his business tax is $9.5 trillion, for his income tax $7.7 trillion, and for his sales tax $8.3 trillion. And there you have it! Three federal taxes at 9% that would raise roughly $2.3 trillion and replace the current income tax, corporate tax, payroll tax (employer and employee), capital gains tax and estate tax.

The whole purpose of a flat tax, à la 9-9-9, is to lower marginal tax rates and simplify the tax code. With lower marginal tax rates (and boy will marginal tax rates be lower with the 9-9-9 plan), both the demand for and the supply of labor and capital will increase. Output will soar, as will jobs. Tax revenues will also increase enormously—not because tax rates have increased, but because marginal tax rates have decreased.

By making the tax codes a lot simpler, we’d allow individuals and businesses to spend a lot less on maintaining tax records; filing taxes; hiring lawyers, accountants and tax-deferral experts; and lobbying Congress. As I wrote on this page earlier this year (“The 30-Cent Tax Premium,” April 18), for every dollar of business and personal income taxes paid, some 30 cents in out-of-pocket expenses also were paid to comply with the tax code. Under 9-9-9, these expenses would plummet without a penny being lost to the U.S. Treasury. It’s a win-win.

A static revenue-neutral tax change requires static winners and losers. And this 9-9-9 plan has made certain that even on static terms those below the poverty line will be better off—period. Once the dynamics take hold, many of those below the poverty line will find good jobs and thus will rise above the poverty line and start paying taxes. This is the type of tax increase I wholeheartedly support.

We don’t particularly care which of the leading contenders gets the GOP nomination. After all, look what he’s up against. But we think a few things are noteworthy about Mr. Cain: (a) he keeps getting written off by insiders although not a single primary has taken place and the Tea Party really likes him; (b) he has sparked some welcome and long overdue debate in the unlikeliest of places; and (c) whatever you think of 9-9-9 it is a marketing masterstroke — every presidential candidate on stage in the GOP debate was forced to focus on one man and an economic plan for America that came from a guy that no one had ever heard of 60 days ago.

Doug Schoen’s polling firm visited OWS. Curiously, Schoen never explicitly mentions his findings that about a third of the crowd are self-identified Bolsheviks who yearn for a repeat of 1917 here in the USA:

Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion. Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence.

Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda. The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%)…

What binds a large majority of the protesters together — regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education — is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas…Fewer than one in three (32%) call themselves Democrats, while roughly the same proportion (33%) say they aren’t represented by any political party.

So a third of the group are D, a third of the group are I, and a third of the group are what exactly? Schoen doesn’t say. How very odd for a pollster to withhold such an interesting bit of data.

The Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze is the one where the key clue was the dog that didn’t bark. The dog was silent. Mr. Schoen, a Clinton pollster, is silent too. He doesn’t name the political party or parties that 1/3 of the OWS crew belong to, though he does use the phrase “radical redistribution of wealth.” Gee, what party is that? It seems clear enough that a third of the group self-identified as Communists of one sort or another, but in our opinion Mr. Schoen didn’t want to embarrass his Democrat friends and clients by pointing it out too explicitly.

The administration has thrown in with the OWS types. No surprise there. But this isn’t Cuba or Venezuela. Schoen’s silence speaks volumes about the troubles that are in for the Democrats if they continue to go this route.

National Journal:

Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, has seen a spark recently, spiking in national and state surveys. (Straw polls are meaningless: Just ask Ron Paul, who won many in 2008 yet failed to win a single caucus or primary.) But Cain appears to have little if any campaign infrastructure and few resources to take advantage of a surge. Additionally, many Republicans believe that President Obama’s lack of experience contributed to his problems in the White House; they argue that electing Cain would simply replace one inexperienced candidate with another. While it’s nice to talk about an executive track record, the question remains whether running Godfather’s Pizza or overseeing 400 Burger Kings in the Philadelphia region are sufficient preparation for becoming president of the United States and leader of the free world.

Fitting in campaign events around Cain’s long-planned book tour is certainly an interesting approach to the final stretch leading into the first caucuses and primaries—a time critical for fundraising and laying the groundwork for the grind that starts just after the first of the year. To be sure, a lot of conservatives like what Cain is saying and the way he says it, and they’re intrigued by his 9-9-9 tax plan (even though, as Bachmann points out, you flip it over and it becomes the devilish 6-6-6). But without money and an organization, he could be all dressed up with no place to go.

Cain seems to be functioning as a parking place for conservatives who have grown disillusioned or who harbor reservations about the previous flavors of the month. Until he demonstrates strength in some of these other dimensions (fundraising, campaign organization), it’s a good bet that Cain is little more than a place for conservatives to window shop while they decide what to do. If Gertrude Stein were alive, she might observe that with the Cain campaign, “there is no there there.”

In reality, there is an extraordinarily high probability that the Republican nominee will be either former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

The conventional wisdom would seem to suggest that Cook is right, at least about Romney. On the other hand, who would have thought that a guy you never heard of two months ago is now ahead of the incumbent 43-41% among likely voters (and has a 16 point lead among the critical demographic of voters over 65)? Strange times indeed.

We’ve heard OWS compared to the anti-war protests of the sixties and seventies. Let’s revisit a little bit of history from that earlier time to see whether the comparison is apt. As you know, the Vietnam War was a decade long conflict in which over 2.5 million Americans served, and 58,000 Americans died. Vietnam era draftees numbered 1.7 million (and they accounted for 30% of deaths in Vietnam).

From the early days of the Vietnam War, there was a small anti-war movement, perhaps similar in size to the small groups that today gather in public parks in various cities. It included some people sincerely troubled by the war, but as David Horowitz said, it was led by “Marxists and radicals who supported a communist victory.” Until 1967, the Vietnam anti-war movement was something of a sideshow. After that it began to grow significantly in numbers and organization, as a result of changes in the draft. The growth of the Vietnam anti-war movement was in large measure grounded in self-interest; a lot of college students didn’t want to go into the military after they graduated.

The protest movement became intense only after the draft expanded substantially in the young adult population (first to 29,000 a month and then to 42,000 a month by spring 1968), and after the passage of the Selective Service Act of 1967. That Act made it more difficult to get a draft deferment, and in fact created the violent and intense war protests at prestigious institutions, since it cancelled graduate school deferments, beginning with the fall 1968 student year. That gave rise to the takeovers at Columbia and elsewhere, and led to the huge marches on Washington and other protests. There is no similar catalyst for OWS.

As contemporaneous reporting in the Harvard Crimson demonstrated, the end of the deferments threw elite university students and professors into the frenzy of sit-ins, takeovers, and demostrations that began in 1968. The students were given cover by the biggest of big guns in the media, Walter Cronkite. He said in February 1968 that it was “increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Who’d want to sign up for Cronkite’s version of the war?

So, despite rhetoric that claimed all sorts of moral high ground, a lot of the protesters simply wanted not to get drafted. You can agree or disagree with that sentiment, but it is clear from the numbers that many of the young people had a simple objective. It was realized in 1973 when the US ended the draft.

By contrast, what specific thing do the OWS people want? Mark Steyn’s guess is that “the ‘Occupy’ movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment…One of their demands is for a trillion dollars in ‘environmental restoration.’ Hey, why not? It’s only a trillion.” Since there is no clear demand for anything, the demands of this tiny group, such as they are, can never be satisfied. It’s hard to see what increased volume and hooliganism can lead to other than bad outcomes. (Jeff at Protein Wisdom says that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.)

Final point. It’s worth noting that while the mostly young protesters were pursuing their anti-draft goals forty years ago, the oldsters weren’t taking things lying down. Things didn’t out so well for George McGovern in 1972, though he did carry Massachusetts. So what’s the administration’s secret plan to avoid another disaster next year like the one they had last year?