the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.

You’ve got to give the guy credit. He’s been consistent and disciplined, if unusually quiet about his agenda. Taxes aren’t about revenue but about fairness and so forth. And none of it is news, in part because 9 out of 10 reporters take what he’s saying for granted.

Is it fair that federal employees receive benefits that are nearly 50% higher than those of private-sector workers whose taxes pay their salaries?…Is it fair that thousands of workers won’t have jobs because the president sided with environmentalists and blocked the shovel-ready Keystone XL oil pipeline?…Is it fair that wind, solar and ethanol producers get billions of dollars of subsidies each year and pay virtually no taxes, while the oil and gas industry — which provides at least 10 times as much energy — pays tens of billions of dollars of taxes while the president complains that it is “subsidized”?…Is it fair that roughly 88% of political contributions from supposedly impartial network television reporters, producers and other employees in 2008 went to Democrats?…Is it fair that our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids — who never voted for Mr. Obama — will have to pay off the $5 trillion of debt accumulated over the past four years, without any benefits to them?

Mr. Moore has compiled quite an extensive list. Life is unfair, JFK famously said (though apparently not always for him during his days in the White House).

Examiner:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explained that the number of people dropping out of the work force, which artificially depresses the unemployment rate, can be regarded as an “economic positive.” “A large percentage of that is due to younger people getting more education, which in the end is an economic positive,” Carney said. “This increase in the number of people leaving the work force has been a trend and a fact since 2000, because of an aging population”

This chart tells a different story:

An unemployment rate doesn’t drop two points in a month because kids are staying in school longer. And the amount of the “aging population” still in the workforce is near historic highs, since they can’t afford to retire. Once again we feel like we’re living in a world where it’s Opposite Day from the politicians and their captive media every single day. HT: GP

West wondered Friday. “Is this dramatic supposed decrease in black unemployment a result of job creation or is someone playing around with the census numbers?” Economists reached by The Hill for comment couldn’t fully explain the unemployment rate change for the black community. William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke University specializing in African-American studies and economics, wrote in an email to The Hill that the decline could have been due to a smaller labor force. He called the drop an “unbelievably dramatic drop” but didn’t rule out the possibility of someone tampering with the numbers; he said there was no evidence one way or the other. “If a large proportion of the persons exiting from the labor force were black (and the exists [sic] presumably were due to people giving up on looking for work) that could drop the black rate without any significant new employment,” Darity wrote. “But a one month drop in the black unemployment rate from 15.8% to 13.6% strikes me as somewhat unprecedented.” President Obama hailed the January unemployment news as a sign that the economy is growing stronger.

As we said, confusing, and not in a good way.

When I visited the House of Lords’ minister, Lord Marland, at the Climate Change Department a couple of years ago, I asked him and the Department’s chief number-cruncher, Professor David Mackay (neither a climate scientist nor an economist, of course) to show me the Department’s calculations detailing just how much “global warming” that might otherwise occur this century would be prevented by the $30 billion per year that the Department was committed to spend between 2011 and 2050 -– $1.2 trillion in all.

There was a horrified silence. The birds stopped singing. The Minister adjusted his tie. The Permanent Secretary looked at his watch. Professor Mackay looked as though he wished the plush sofa into which he was disappearing would swallow him up entirely.

Eventually, in a very small voice, the Professor said, “Er, ah, mphm, that is, oof, arghh, we’ve never done any such calculation.” The biggest tax increase in human history had been based not upon a mature scientific assessment followed by a careful economic appraisal, but solely upon blind faith. I said as much. “Well,” said the Professor, “maybe we’ll get around to doing the calculations next October.” They still haven’t done the calculations -– or, rather, I suspect they have done them but have kept the results very quiet

The environment minister of Northern Ireland weighed in on related matters a few years ago.

The Labor Department reported a loss of 2,689,000 jobs in January…In January 2010, as I said, there was an actual, unadjusted job loss of 2,858,000 jobs. To make it simple, the government computers were expecting a bigger unadjusted loss than the 2,689,000 jobs because last January’s decline was 2,858,000. Why weren’t there as many job losses this January? Very likely because the weather throughout the country is a lot milder this year than during the past two Januarys. A loss of jobs that isn’t as bad as expected turns into a job gain. Does that mean there really are 243,000 new jobs out there? Absolutely not.

Let’s say there are rumors in your company that 300 people are going to be laid off. Instead, management decides to fire just 200. Two hundred people, of course, have lost their jobs. But, adjusting it for expectations, 100 people didn’t get fired. Using this analogy, the government would say that, on an expectation-adjusted basis, 100 jobs were created. That’s sort of what happened in the January employment report because of seasonal adjustment.

Let’s get this straight. Jobs went down 2.7 million instead of 2.9 million in January and this is a job gain of 243,000 jobs? Okay. The labor force lost 1.7 million people, which trnslated into a seasonally adjusted 1.2 million people, so the labor force participation rate continued its drop to historic lows among prime age workers.

Meanwhile, the actual non-seasonally adjusted jobs number for December and January is a loss of 2.9 million jobs (which the BLS translated, using a methodology that we were unable to determine, into a job gain of 446,000 jobs). And these jobs losses and labor force losses are a cause for celebration? Huh? It’s all kind of confusing to us, and not in a good way.

Zero hedge claims that 1.2 million Americans somehow dropped out of the labor force in one month. If that’s true, it’s both interesting and very odd indeed. What could be going on?

when I talk about our financial institutions playing by the same rules as folks on Main Street, when I talk about making sure insurance companies aren’t discriminating against those who are already sick, or making sure that unscrupulous lenders aren’t taking advantage of the most vulnerable among us, I do so because I genuinely believe it will make the economy stronger for everybody. But I also do it because I know that far too many neighbors in our country have been hurt and treated unfairly over the last few years, and I believe in God’s command to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” I know the version of that Golden Rule is found in every major religion and every set of beliefs — from Hinduism to Islam to Judaism to the writings of Plato.

Words are like the tides. They come and go, nice to watch, with no lasting impact. Who cares if the Golden Rule is something else than represented above? Who cares if Plato said something other than claimed above? No one will check; no one will care. (We’ve seen it all before, over and over again.) Bonus points if you can figure out why Plato was included on the list.

We haven’t had much to say recently of a partisan nature, because really, it’s just awful out there, and boring too. Here’s a change of pace, however, with some cleverness added into the mix. The little sub-messages are a nice touch. HT: Ace

Sugar and other sweeteners are, in fact, so toxic to the human body that they should be regulated as strictly as alcohol by governments worldwide, according to a commentary in the current issue of the journal Nature by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The researchers propose regulations such as taxing all foods and drinks that include added sugar, banning sales in or near schools and placing age limits on purchases…

In the United States, more than two-thirds of the population is overweight, and half of them are obese. About 80 percent of those who are obese will have diabetes or metabolic disorders and will have shortened lives, according to the UCSF authors of the commentary, led by Robert Lustig. And about 75 percent of U.S. health-care dollars are spent on diet-related diseases, the authors said. Worldwide, the obese now greatly outnumber the undernourished…

Lustig, a medical doctor in UCSF’s Department of Pediatrics, compares added sugar to tobacco and alcohol (coincidentally made from sugar) in that it is addictive, toxic and has a negative impact on society, thus meeting established public health criteria for regulation. Lustig advocates a consumer tax on any product with added sugar…ban the sale of sugary drinks to children under age 17 and to tighten zoning laws for the sale of sugary beverages and snacks around schools and in low-income areas

In a country where the EPA has issued an endangerment finding about a gas that is necessary for life to exist on earth, it is possible to imagine the government requiring a photo ID and a prescription to buy a bag of sugar. How life has changed in the last half century, and in many ways not for the better.

Officials in southern China appear to have averted environmental calamity by halting the spread of a toxic metal that had threatened to foul drinking water for tens of millions of people, the state media reported Monday. Officials said they had successfully diluted the concentration of cadmium, a poisonous component of batteries, that has been coursing down the Longjiang River…

half the nation’s rivers and lakes are unfit for human contact, and news reports of chemical and oil spills are commonplace here. Although the central government has invested more than $3 billion to improve water quality in recent years, officials estimate that more than 300 million people still do not have access to clean drinking water…

10 percent of the nation’s rice crop contained excessive cadmium levels. In several southern provinces, 60 percent of rice samples were found to exceed the national standard for the heavy metal…“Only when fish started dying did they publicly acknowledge there was a problem,” Mr. Ma said.

In China they have Real Pollution. In the US we have not had serious pollution problems in decades; instead we now have pretend pollution, and Americans are so mal-educated that they don’t even know it. 16 of the 20 dirtiest cities in the world are in China. The country’s water is appalling. And how about the great taste of melamine?

Meanwhile, in the US, we have geniuses like this: “Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now.” The US has 20,000 airports, while China has fewer than 200 for civilian use. Some infrastructure! Some genius!

they noticed what appeared to be a uniformed Transportation Security Administration officer holding a leashed police dog. “He just loosened the leash on the dog, and the dog came over to check me out,” Vetter said. Standing on the platform above Vetter were three other officers who appeared to be wearing bullet-proof vests…The Vetters had encountered VIPR — special TSA Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams…

The program has 15 teams and is expanding to get access to 12 new teams…officers include plainclothes and uniformed team members — some of them armed — who arrive without telling passengers in advance. Officers in the joint operations then randomly ask travelers for permission to search their bags for explosives.

To prevent accusations of profiling, searchers choose a random number — eight for example — and then search the bags of every eighth passenger…local and federal authorities insist the searches are not mandatory. But passengers who refuse are not allowed on the train…

Police Chief Christopher Trucillo, who works regularly with VIPR teams, acknowledged that the search system isn’t perfect. Potential attackers carrying explosives who refuse searches are free to simply drive to the next station on the line and board there…

A high-profile example of VIPR’s growing pains, transit officials say, is a VIPR-assisted passenger screening a year ago at Amtrak’s station in Savannah, Georgia. Instead of screening passengers as they boarded trains — which is standard security procedure — officers were screening passengers as they were getting off trains. Security experts know that makes no sense

Let’s count the ways that this totally unnecessary government intrusion into citizens’ lives is offensive and ridiculous. It’s expensive, ineffective because of its randomness, clueless in that it searches people getting off trains, and inane because all a hypothetical bad guy would have to do is drive to the next station. But be warned: better not tweet anything about Marilyn Monroe — or else!

Leigh Van Bryan, 26, was handcuffed and kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers for 12 hours after landing in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. The Department of Homeland Security flagged him as a potential threat when he posted an excited tweet to his pals about his forthcoming trip to Hollywood which read: ‘Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America’…Despite telling officials the term ‘destroy’ was British slang for ‘party’, they were held on suspicion of planning to ‘commit crimes’ and had their passports confiscated…

Leigh was also quizzed about another tweet which quoted hit US comedy Family Guy which read: ’3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA pissing people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up! Federal agents even searched his suitcase looking for spades and shovels, claiming Emily was planning to act as Leigh’s ‘look out’ while he raided Marilyn’s tomb.

Bar manager Leigh, from Coventry, and Emily, 24, from Birmingham, were then quizzed for five hours at LAX before they were handcuffed and put into a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight. They spent 12 hours in separate holding cells…’They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party. ‘I almost burst out laughing when they asked me if I was going to be Leigh’s lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe.

Leigh’s charge sheet, alongside a police mug shot and finger print, added: ‘He had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. ‘Also on his tweeter account Mr Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.’

We think twitter is an invitation to get caught up in unpleasant things, but this is ridiculous. It would appear that it’s not just the TSA that has lost all sense of proportion and common sense. (Oh, and by the way, it’s impossible to dig up Marilyn Monroe, since she’s not underground.)

There was no incentive to work hard — to go out to the fields early, to put in extra effort, Yen Jingchang says. “Work hard, don’t work hard — everyone gets the same,” he says. “So people don’t want to work.” In Xiaogang there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate. So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest…

Despite the risks, they decided they had to try this experiment — and to write it down as a formal contract, so everyone would be bound to it. By the light of an oil lamp, Yen Hongchang wrote out the contract. The farmers agreed to divide up the land among the families. Each family agreed to turn over some of what they grew to the government, and to the collective. And, crucially, the farmers agreed that families that grew enough food would get to keep some for themselves. The contract also recognized the risks the farmers were taking. If any of the farmers were sent to prison or executed, it said, the others in the group would care for their children until age 18…

by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed. At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined. That huge harvest gave them away…

fortunately for Mr. Yen and the other farmers, at this moment in history, there were powerful people in the Communist Party who wanted to change China’s economy. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who would go on to create China’s modern economy, was just coming to power. So instead of executing the Xiaogang farmers, the Chinese leaders ultimately decided to hold them up as a model. Within a few years, farms all over China adopted the principles in that secret document. People could own what they grew. The government launched other economic reforms, and China’s economy started to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China.

In 1623 William Bradford figured out the same thing after the Pilgrims spent two years on their communal farms: “they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could…so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number…and ranged all boys and youth under some family. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious…The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability.”

It is of note that terrible hardships preceded the discovery of simple truths. In the case of China, tens of millions of people died over decades in service of Mao’s utopian fantasies. In Plymouth it took them three hard years to figure out how to deal with the freeloaders. Small wonder that in our world today, ideas that have lived off a lazy prosperity, like green energy and global warming, are having some problems of their own.

the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts. Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade — indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections — suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted — or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before — for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired

The list of heretics is getting pretty long now.

Spengler:

The rush out of the Egyptian pound is so rapid that Egyptian investors refuse to hold debt in their own national currency, even at a 16% yield. After Islamist parties won more three-quarters of the seats in recent parliamentary elections – 47% for the Muslim Brotherhood and 25% for the even more extreme al-Nour Party – the business elite that prospered under military rule is counting the days before exile. The first reports of actual hunger in provincial Egyptian towns, meanwhile, are starting to trickle in…

It seems unlikely that Egypt’s central bank will be able to prevent a banana-republic devaluation of the Egyptian pound, and a sharp rise in prices for a population of whom half barely consumes enough to prevent starvation. The difference between Egypt and a banana republic, though, is the bananas: unlike the bankrupt Latin Americans, who exported food, Egypt imports half its caloric consumption. Meat imports have already fallen by 60% over the past year…

Nearly half of Egyptians are functionally illiterate. Nine-tenths of adult women have suffered genital mutilation. Almost a third of Egyptians marry first or second cousins, the fail-safe indicator of a clan-based society. Half of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day, and must spend half of that on food…It should have been no surprise that the Islamists swept the parliamentary elections, given the desperation of the people and the cupidity of the political system. The Wafd Party, Egypt’s oldest secular political entity, polled just 9% of the vote.

Delusional as it was to expect Egyptians to support secular liberal parties that never existed and offered no solution to their desperation, it is all the more delusional to expect the Islamists to stabilize Egypt. The Islamist victory in the first round of voting last year almost certainly prompted the jump in capital flight in December, and the consolidation of Islamist power. Egypt’s middle class will leave and tourism, down by a third over the past year, will virtually disappear

We saw this sort of thing coming a year ago. But the wise ones said, “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.”

As you can see, almost no one — a mere 2% of those polled — thinks income inequality is a priority compared to the economy generally. Here’s why:

Want to be a leveler? Good luck with that.

Hardly anyone asked whether lax mortgage lending would trigger a broad financial crisis, because America had not experienced a broad financial crisis since the Great Depression. A true financial crisis differs from falling stock prices, which are common. A financial crisis involves the failure of banks or other institutions, panic in many markets and a pervasive loss of wealth and confidence. Such a crisis was not within the personal experience of members of the FOMC — or anyone. Nor was it part of mainstream economic thinking. Because it hadn’t happened in decades, it was assumed that it couldn’t happen. There had been previous real estate busts. From 1964 to 1966, new housing starts fell 24 percent; from 1972 to 1975, 51 percent; from 1979 to 1982, 39 percent; from 1988 to 1991, 32 percent. Declining home construction had fed economic slowdowns or recessions. So the natural question seemed: Would this happen now? The answer seemed “no”…

There’s a paradox to economic policy. The more it succeeds at prolonging short-term prosperity, the more it inspires long-run destabilizing behavior by businesses, banks, consumers, investors and government. If they think basic stability is assured, they will assume greater risks — loosen credit standards, borrow more, engage in more speculation, relax wage and price behavior — that ultimately make the economy less stable. Long booms threaten deep busts. Since World War II, this has happened twice. In the 1960s, the so-called “new economics” promised that, by manipulating the budget and interest rates, it could stifle business cycles. The ensuing boom spanned the 1960s; the bust extended to the early 1980s and included inflation of 13 percent, four recessions and peak monthly unemployment of 10.8 percent. The latest episode was the so-called Great Moderation, largely paralleling Greenspan’s Fed tenure (1987-2006), when there were only two mild recessions (1990-91 and 2001). We are now in the bust. The Fed slept mainly because it overlooked the possibility of boom-bust.

(We certainly did not understand what was happening when we first noticed the sub-prime mortgage market in early 2007. Nor did we understand it well when the Bear Stearns conference call tanked the market in August of that year.) We think there’s another factor that was in play as well: computer models. Recall that the largest investment banks were allowed to write their own capital rules at this time by the government, because they were so smart and had very sophisticated computer models showing that they had excess capital even at ratios as low as 4-5%. GIGO as it turned out.

The latest vessel is Newt Gingrich, obviously flawed in many ways. But take a moment to read what he’s saying. It’s less the messenger than the message that has the power. We think that GOP primary voters believe that a minimally acceptable candidate articulating that message clearly and unapologetically is electable by a sizeable majority of voters. After all, in the wake of the ridiculous Keystone decision, even staunch liberals are shaking their heads about the disastrous course the administration has set for the country. We don’t recall a recent analogy to this bubbling up of opinion from the grass roots. (Eugene McCarthy’s strong losing performance in the 1968 New Hampshire primary comes to mind.) If the insiders don’t quite get what is going on, it wouldn’t be the first time.

To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor’s degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. I specify white, meaning non-Latino white, as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become. Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. I specify ages 30 to 49 — what I call prime-age adults — to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the ages of marriage or retirement. In Belmont and Fishtown, here’s what happened to America’s common culture between 1960 and 2010.

Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married — 94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.

Single parenthood: Another aspect of marriage — the percentage of children born to unmarried women — showed just as great a divergence. Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. This unwelcome reality persists even after controlling for the income and education of the parents. In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education — women, that is, with a Fishtown education — were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970.

Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere. In Fishtown, the change has been drastic. (To avoid conflating this phenomenon with the latest recession, I use data collected in March 2008 as the end point for the trends.) The primary indicator of the erosion of industriousness in the working class is the increase of prime-age males with no more than a high school education who say they are not available for work — they are “out of the labor force.” That percentage went from a low of 3% in 1968 to 12% in 2008. Twelve percent may not sound like much until you think about the men we’re talking about: in the prime of their working lives, their 30s and 40s, when, according to hallowed American tradition, every American man is working or looking for work. Almost one out of eight now aren’t. Meanwhile, not much has changed among males with college educations. Only 3% were out of the labor force in 2008…

“The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. “On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.” Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

From the WSJ a couple of years ago: “the CDC reported that about 40% of American children were born out of wedlock in 2007, more than triple the 11% who were in 1970.” It seems clear enough to us that the government has to stop subsidizing this sort of behavior or fairly soon the country will be in an even bigger mess than it is now.

So many people who are so concerned about jobs, about medical costs, about the everyday parts of life, and who feel that the elites in Washington and New York have no understanding, no care, no concern, no reliability, and in fact do not represent them at all.

In the last two debates we had…where people reacted so strongly to the news media, I think it was something very fundamental that I wish that the powers that be in the news media would take seriously. The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and to become some kind of other system, and the reaction…People completely misunderstand what’s going on. It’s not that I am a good debater, it’s that I articulate the deepest held views of the American people…

If Barack Obama can get reelected after this disaster, just think how radical he would be in a second term…there are a number of key issues we have to talk about with the President. I believe this campaign comes down to economics, including jobs, economic growth, balancing the budget, the value of money, comes down to national security, what threatens us and what to do about it, but the centerpiece of this campaign is about American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky…

What we are going to argue is that American exceptionalism, the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. He draws his from the Saul Alinsky, the radical left-wingers, and people who don’t like the classical America…

One of the keys issues, and I’m prepared to take this straight to the President and frankly, straight to the elite media…is the growing anti-religious bigotry of the elites…The second big theme that every South Carolinian understands is jobs, economic growth…I want to go into every neighborhood of every ethnic background in the country and say to the people very simply, if you want your children to have a life of dependency and food stamps, you have a candidate and that’s Barack Obama. If you want your children to have a life of indepedency and paychecks, you have a candidate and that’s Newt Gingrich…

Part of our long-term security interests is having an American energy policy. I want America to become so energy independent that no American President ever again bows to a Saudi King. Let me give you an example of a common sense conservatism that solves problems. You have well over $29 billion of natural gas offshore. As President I will authorize on the very first day the development of it. That natural gas will create jobs that, in Louisiana, average $80,000 apiece. In addition, it generates royalties. Part of the royalties should be used to modernize the port of Charleston, which affects 1 out of every 5 jobs in South Carolina.

But it’s not enough just to find the money. The Corps of Engineers bureaucracy is so long and so stupid that they currently take 8 years to study, not to do the project but to study the project. We fought the entire Second World War in 3 years and 8 months. Now if you can beat Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan in 3 years and 8 months, it is almost unimaginable that it now takes 8 years to study the project…

The President’s decision to veto the Keystone pipeline…you have to wonder how out-of-touch with reality this administration is…The President says, no, we don’t want you to build a pipeline from central Canada straight down, with no mountains intervening, to the largest petrochemical center in the world, Houston, so that we would make money on the pipeline, we would make money on managing the pipeline, we would make money on refining the oil, and we would make money in the ports of Galveston and Houston shipping the oil.

Oh no, we don’t want to do that because Barack Obama is taking care of his extremist left-wing friends in San Francisco. They think that will really stop the oil from getting out. No. Prime Minister Harper…is going to cut a deal with the Chinese, and they will build a pipeline straight across the Rockies to Vancouver. We will get none of the jobs, none of the energy, none of the opportunity. An American President who can create a Chinese-Canadian partnership is truly a danger to this country.

Gingrich certainly owes a great deal to the much-reviled media, and possibly to Romney’s mishandling of his tax issue. More surprises ahead no doubt, but even Romney partisans know that important changes are needed, and quick.

Beck Laxton, 46, and partner Kieran Cooper, 44, have spent half the decade concealing the gender of their son, Sasha. “I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping,” Laxton said in an interview with the Cambridge News. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?…Sasha dresses in clothes he likes — be it a hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother. The big no-no’s are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants.

In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha’s dressed in a shiny pink girl’s swimsuit. “Children like sparkly things,” says Beck. “And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?”…

When Sasha turned five and headed to school, Laxton was forced to make her son’s sex public. That meant Sasha would have to get used to being a boy in the eyes of his peers. Still, his mom is intervening. While the school requires different uniforms for boys and girls, Sasha wears a girl’s blouse with his pants.

Makes us want to play matchmaker. Look, almost anything’s better to comment on than the drip, drip, drip of the primary season, or the appalling situation in Washington.

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,

The lesbian parents of an 11-year-old boy who is undergoing the process of becoming a girl last night defended the decision, claiming it was better for a child to have a sex change when young. Thomas Lobel, who now calls himself Tammy, is undergoing controversial hormone blocking treatment in Berkeley, California to stop him going through puberty as a boy…The mothers say that one of the first things Thomas told them when he learned sign language aged three — because of a speech impediment — was, ‘I am a girl’. At age seven, after threatening genital mutilation on himself, psychiatrists diagnosed Thomas with gender identity disorder…This summer, he started taking hormone-blocking drugs…Tammy Lobel’s hormones are being blocked by an implant on the inside of the 11-year-old’s upper left arm, which must be replaced once a year. Ms Moreno explained: ‘In other words, she will stay as a pre-pubescent boy until she decides and we feel that she can make this decision about surgery.’

As VDH noted recently, civilizations often devolve. Exhibit A above. Unlike 50 years ago, we now live in a world where smoking a cigarette can get you in trouble, but this abusive freak show doesn’t.

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.

the dreadful infection of journalism got into my system. Turning aside from the honorable occupation of teaching, I started writing articles about the wrongs of the Egyptian people, how they were clamoring, and rightly so, for a democratic setup, and how they would never be satisfied with less than one man one vote and all that went therewith…That at least was what I wrote in my articles, and they went flying over to England, and, like homing pigeons, in through the windows of the Guardian office in Manchester, at that time a high citadel of liberalism. That was where the truth was being expounded, that was where enlightenment reigned.

Of course that was in the 1920′s, but you can find the same sort of thing today.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

STAND AGAINST “ZEROING OUT” AID TO ISRAEL Republican candidates for president Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich all say they would cut foreign aid to Israel — and every other country — to zero. Stand up to this extreme isolationism and join the call to reject the Romney-Perry-Gingrich plan.

How very odd, and from this guy’s team to boot.

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.

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.

the president’s biggest failures have been his own ideas….Obama arrived in office afire with the ambition to create a Palestinian state within two years. But his diplomacy was based on a twofold misunderstanding: that the key to successful negotiations was forcing Israel to stop all settlement construction — and that the United States had the leverage to make that happen.

Veterans of the Middle East “peace process” shook their heads in wonderment as what at first appeared to be a rookie error evolved into a two-year standoff between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There was only one possible explanation for this persistence in futility: The president himself was fixed on it.

Obama’s next big project was global nuclear arms control — an initiative so impressive to Norwegians that it won him the Nobel Peace Prize before he could act on it. Yet the results to date hardly seem prizeworthy. The New Start nuclear arms agreement with Russia merely ratifies warhead reductions already underway in Russia, while imposing a modest cut on the U.S. arsenal. More ambitious multilateral initiatives by Obama — to control nuclear materials, for example — have made little progress, despite an elaborate summit the president hosted in 2010.

Here again there appears to be a disconnect between Obama’s 1970s-vintage ideas and the real world of the early 21st century. There’s nothing wrong, and modest good, in extending Cold War nuclear conventions with Russia, or extracting highly enriched uranium from Ukraine and Chile. But the most dangerous proliferation threats emanate from countries that don’t attend summits or sign international treaties, such as North Korea and Iran. In terms of nuclear capability, both are ahead of where they were in 2009.

This brings us to Obama’s most distinctive — and most ill-fated — idea, and the one most identified with his 2008 campaign: the determination to “engage” with U.S. adversaries such as Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. Obama promised “direct diplomacy” — even one-to-one meetings — with the likes of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Kim Jong Il. More broadly he made the case that the United States could benefit by reaching out to autocratic regimes…

In his first year Obama dispatched two letters to Khamenei while keeping his distance from the revolutionary Green movement. He shook hands with Hugo Chavez. He launched a “reset” of relations with Russia’s Vladi­mir Putin and dispatched envoys to reason with Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. He delivered a sweeping address to the Muslim world from Cairo.

The results have been meager. Khamenei spurned the U.S. outreach. Relations with Putin warmed for a time but now have grown cold again. In Egypt and across the Middle East, the president’s popularity is lower today than when he gave the Cairo address.

The Post offers no explanation for the litany of failures it cites. Remarkable enough that a Democrat wrote the piece. We’ll leave it to VDH to provide a rationale: “American foreign policy is now becoming an extension not of classically liberal values, but of progressive suspicions of constitutional government, capitalism, and the historical role of the United States in particular and the West in general. The bowing to foreign potentates, the sad historical fabrications in the Cairo speech, the self-serving nonsense that arose in the first Al-Arabiya interview, and the so-called ‘apology tour’ were simply superficial manifestations of a deeper ambiguity about America.” He’s being charitable.

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?

it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting…as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto…

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Egypt is a country with no democratic tradition, over 40% illiteracy and grinding poverty. Terrible unemployment and underemployment. And a 65% vote in favor of more of the same. So who is closer to understanding Egypt, the Tom above or the NYT’s Tom?

the Islamist parties — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party — just crushed the secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free Egyptian parliamentary elections, winning some 65 percent of the seats. To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic, anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to be recklessly naïve. But to assume that the Islamists will not be impacted, or moderated, by the responsibilities of power, by the contending new power centers here and by the priority of the public for jobs and clean government is to miss the dynamism of Egyptian politics today.

Flashback: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.”

“The Obamas,” by New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor, tells of the first Halloween party the first couple feted at the White House in 2009…George Lucas sent the original Chewbacca to mingle with invited guests…“White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans — or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care — that the event was not discussed publicly…

the White House made certain that more humble Halloween festivities earlier that day — for thousands of Washington-area schoolkids — were well reported by the press corps. Then the Obamas went inside, where an invitation-only affair for children of military personnel and White House administrators unfolded in the East Room…

the State Dining Room had also been transformed into a secretive White House Wonderland. Tim Burton decorated it “in his signature creepy-comic style. His film version was about to be released, and he had turned the room into the Mad Hatter’s tea party, with a long table set with antique-looking linens, enormous stuffed animals in chairs, and tiered serving plates with treats like bone-shaped meringue cookies,” reports the book…“Fruit punch was served in blood vials at the bar. Burton’s own Mad Hatter, the actor Johnny Depp, presided over the scene in full costume, standing up on a table to welcome everyone in character.”

Comments: (a) did reporters really not know about this — hard to believe; (b) no wonder the administration kept it secret; (c) also from that time period, compare and contrast; and (d) added bonus, Shrinkwrapped’s take from election night 2008.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fisker Automotive is recalling all 239 of its 2012 Karma luxury plug-in hybrid cars because of a fire hazard, according to a report filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Prices on the 2012 model start at $103,000…the problem was discovered on Dec. 16, when workers at the Valmet Automotive assembly plant in Finland noticed coolant dripping…fewer than 50 vehicles were in the hands of consumers.

Hmmm. Made in Finland. Costs $100K. Nobody buys them. Hybrid that gets only 20mpg. Sets itself on fire. What could the punchline be? Some kind of joke about the USSR? No, sadly, the joke’s on all of us.

millions of Americans remain unaware that this nation is broke –- broker than any nation has ever been. A few days before Christmas, we sailed across the psychological Rubicon and joined the club of nations whose government debt now exceeds their total GDP. It barely raised a murmur -– and those who took the trouble to address the issue noted complacently that our 100 percent debt-to-GDP ratio is a mere two-thirds of Greece’s. That’s true, but at a certain point per capita comparisons are less relevant than the sheer hard dollar sums: Greece owes a few rinky-dink billions; America owes more money than anyone has ever owed anybody ever.

Public debt has increased by 67 percent over the past three years, and too many Americans refuse even to see it as a problem. For most of us, “$16.4 trillion” has no real meaning, any more than “$17.9 trillion” or “$28.3 trillion” or “$147.8 bazillion.” It doesn’t even have much meaning…there is no politically plausible scenario under which the 16.4 trillion is reduced to 13.7 trillion, and then 7.9 trillion and, eventually, 173 dollars and 48 cents…

Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks. So, for example, a pipeline delivering Canadian energy from Alberta to Texas is blocked by the president on no grounds whatsoever except that the very thought of it is an aesthetic affront to the moneyed Sierra Club types who infest his fundraisers. The offending energy, of course, does not simply get mothballed in the Canadian attic: The Dominion’s Prime Minister has already pointed out that they’ll sell it to the Chinese, whose Politburo lacks our exquisitely refined revulsion at economic dynamism and, indeed, seems increasingly amused by it…

Last January, the BBC’s Brian Milligan inaugurated the New Year by driving an electric Mini from London to Edinburgh, taking advantage of the many government-subsidized charge posts en route. It took him four days, which works out to an average speed of 6 miles per hour – or longer than it would have taken on a stagecoach in the mid-19th century. This was hailed as a great triumph by the environmentalists.

Steyn goes on to talk about the regulatory sclerosis that afflicts the country and is so evident over the march of decades. Of course it’s not all bleak. Some companies in the tech sector continue to show impressive growth. But the heavy lifting of massive job creation can’t occur unless government stops its spending binge and gets out of the way of business. 2013 can’t arrive fast enough.

Henry Miller reads from Black Spring. The narrator has been tasked with bringing his Aunt to the asylum:

It always seemed astounding to me how jolly they were in our family despite the calamities that were always threatening. Jolly in spite of everything. There was cancer, dropsy, cirrhosis of the liver, insanity, thievery, mendacity, buggery, incest, paralysis, tapeworms, abortions, triplets, idiots, drunkards, n’er-do-wells, fanatics, sailors, tailors, watchmakers, scarlet fever, whooping cough, meningitis, running ears, chorea, stutterers, jailbirds, dreamers, storytellers, bartenders — and finally there was Uncle George and Tante Melia. The morgue and the insane asylum.

No one knew that Tante Melia was going completely off her nut, that when we reached the corner she would leap forward like a reindeer and bite a piece out of the moon. And nobody could think quick enough to stop it. Just like that it happened. In the twinkle of a star. And now I’m going to tell you what those bastards said to me…

They said — Henry, you take her to the asylum tomorrow. And don’t tell them that we can afford to pay for her. Fine! Always merry and bright! The next morning we boarded the trolley together and we rode out into the country. If Mele asked where we were going I was to say – “to visit Aunt Monica.” But Mele didn’t ask any questions. She sat quietly beside me and pointed to the cows now and then. She saw blue cows and green ones. She knew their names. She asked what happened to the moon in the daytime. And did I have a piece of liverwurst by any chance?

During the journey I wept — I couldn’t help it. When people are too good for this world they have to be put under lock and key. There’s something wrong with people who are too good. It’s true Mele was lazy. She was born lazy. It’s true that she was a poor housekeeper. It’s true she didn’t know how to hold on to a husband when they found her one. When Paul ran off with the woman from Hamburg she just sat in a corner and wept. The others wanted her to do something — put a bullet into him, raise a rumpus, sue for alimony. But Mele sat quiet. She wept. She hung her head. She was like a pair of torn socks that are kicked around here, there, everywhere. Always turning up at the wrong moment.

And now she’s very tranquil and she calls the cows by their first name. The moon fascinates her. She has no fear because I’m with her and she always trusted me. I was her favorite. Even though she was a halfwit she was good to me. The others were more intelligent, but their hearts were bad.

Sometimes when she was fired from a job they used to send me to fetch her. Mele never knew her way home. And I remember how happy she was whenever she saw me coming. She would say innocently that she wanted to stay with us. Why couldn’t she stay with us? I used to ask myself that over and over. Why couldn’t they make a place for her by the fire, let her sit there and dream, if that’s what she wanted to do? Why must everybody work -– even the saints and the angels? Why must halfwits set a good example? I’m thinking now that after all it may be good for Mele where I’m taking her. No more work. Just the same, I’d rather they had made a corner for her somewhere.

Walking down the gravel path toward the big gates Mele becomes uneasy. Even a puppy knows when it is being carried to a pond to be drowned.

Henry Miller was born in 1891. He lived in a far-off age in America when everyone knew farmers and soldiers. He lived through the first part of the greatest economic and industrial transformation in the history of the world. By the time there was news on the radio, he was in his late 20s. Stardust and White Christmas are bookends to the decade in which he wrote Black Spring in Paris.

And here we are today at the end of 2011. Is the country better or worse off? Of course materially much better off — but consider Miller’s first paragraph above. Look at how robust that writing is and how much our discourse has been dumbed down, self-censored, and made purposefully vague today. Here’s to better luck in 2012! HT: MS

Addendum: China is about 100 years behind the USA’s trends in urbanization and agricultural employment. They’re about where we were at the start of WWI, with some notable differences due to technology. Given the vast changes that have taken place and the vast changes that lie ahead, it’s hard to imagine where this country and China will be in another century.

The Guardian’s front-page headline this morning was ‘NHS cuts have affected patient care say four out of five doctors’. So just how severe are these ‘cuts’? Ten per cent of the budget? Five? Here are the official figures from the Department of Health. At a time when other ministries are indeed under pressure, spending on the NHS will continue to grow year on year throughout the parliament – as it has almost uninterruptedly since 1948. Expenditure will rise from £103.8 billion to £114.4 billion in 2015. It’s true that, once inflation is factored in, the increase is slight – around 0.4 per cent. It’s true, too, that there is a reallocation of funds within that budget from administration to the actual provision of healthcare. Still, in no system of mathematics does this represent a ‘cut’. What, then, is the Guardian talking about? Read far enough and you’ll see that the whole story is based an online survey of, er, 664 self-selected respondents

Middle East Forum:

Consider the New York Times’ coverage, as reported by Adam Nossiter, in an article titled “Nigerian Group Escalates Violence With Church Attacks”: The sect, known as Boko Haram, until now mostly targeted the police, government and military in its insurgency effort, but the bombings on Sunday represented a new, religion-tinged front, a tactic that threatens to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims…

This sentence is fraught with problems. For starters, Boko Haram has been terrorizing Nigerian Christians for years, killing thousands of them, and destroying hundreds of their churches. Considering that just last Christmas Eve, 2010, Boko Haram bombed several churches, killing nearly 40 Christian worshippers, the New York Times’ characterization of these latest attacks as “represent[ing] a new, religion-tinged front” is not only unconscionable, but unprofessional.

Boko Haram — whose full name in Arabic is “People of Sunna for Da’wa [Islamization] and Jihad [Holy War]” — has, for a decade, been representing a very “religion-tinged front,” that is, an Islamic front, one that is hostile to all things non-Muslim, with Christians at the very top. In just the last couple of months, Boko Haram has carried out attacks on dozens of other churches, bombing some, torching others. In one instance, they opened fire on a congregation of mostly women and children, killing dozens; they executed two children of an ex-terrorist because he converted to Christianity

A cut is properly defined as an inadequate increase. A clear religious-political strategy of violence is properly defined an unfortunate religion-tinged tactic that might result in some random man-caused disasters. What about clear writing don’t these whiners understand?

You need a photo ID to get on an airplane or an Amtrak train; to open a bank account, withdraw money from it, or cash a check; to pick up movie and concert tickets; to go into a federal building; to buy alcohol and to apply for food stamps. Most Americans don’t think it’s a hardship to ask voters to produce one. A Rasmussen poll in June indicated 75 percent of respondents support photo ID requirements…

Republicans “want to literally drag us back to Jim Crow laws,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla, chair of the Democratic National Committee. The NAACP has asked the United Nations to intervene to block state voter ID laws. It may have an ulterior motive for opposing ballot security measures. An NAACP official was convicted on 10 counts of absentee voter fraud in Tunica County, Miss., in July…

This year there have been investigations, indictments or convictions for vote fraud in California, Texas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and Maryland. In all but one case, the alleged fraudsters were Democrats…

At least 55 employees or associates of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now have been convicted of registration fraud in 11 states, says Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center, who’s written a book about ACORN. Of 1.3 million new registrations ACORN turned in in 2008, election officials rejected 400,000.

What a waste of four years. The cling to power re-election strategy is to suppress attempts to enforce laws, and accuse the law enforcers of vile motivations. Hint: implicitly calling 75% of Americans names is not a sound strategy, even with the media on your side.

What a waste of four years. Economically, the administration has pursued a relentlessly disciplined agenda that is economically destructive. But in many ways, that’s not the worst of it. The country has a bad case of moral rot, and while there’s not much a president can do about that directly, he can certainly use the bully pulpit to advantage. Or not.

A man was given a great opportunity and squandered it. Oddly enough, it was the opportunity he campaigned on four years ago, but all that was just words. The largest irony is that the facts on the ground offered any number of opportunities for distinction if not greatness, but we’d bet that the administration’s senior team is so blinkered by ideology that they only saw their distorted version of the American reality.

I was not always the very best student that I could be when I was in high school, and certainly not when I was in middle school…I did not love every class I took. I wasn’t always paying attention the way I should have…I remember when I was in 8th grade I had to take a class called ethics. Now, ethics is about right and wrong, but if you’d ask me what my favorite subject was back in 8th grade, it was basketball. I don’t think ethics would have made it on the list.

You don’t even need Freud to figure this one out, but Freud is helpful: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

the CDC reported that about 40% of American children were born out of wedlock in 2007, more than triple the 11% who were in 1970. This means that more than 1.7 million children were born outside of marriage in 2007. Moreover, the vast majority of these babies — 60%, to be precise — were born not to teenagers but to women in their 20s (only 23% of nonmarital births were to teens). Furthermore, the CDC reports that nonmarital childbearing has been rising much faster among adults than among teenagers.

None of this should come as a surprise, given that a 2003 Gallup Survey found that 64% of young adults age 18 to 29 thought that having a baby out of wedlock was “morally acceptable.” But a number of academics and advocates who track family issues are more than willing to provide intellectual cover to contemporary young adults’ laissez-faire approach to childbearing and marriage. For instance, Stephanie Coontz, the director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families, wrote on the New York Times “Room for Debate” blog that “policymakers and researchers need to discard one-size-fits-all generalizations about the causes, consequences, risks and benefits of different family forms. Average outcomes from married and single parenting hide huge variations” in child well-being. Likewise, Silvia Henriquez, the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, urged readers to resist the temptation to “present single motherhood as a problem in itself.”

Ultimately, though, the arguments put forward by Ms. Coontz, Ms. Henriquez and other academics and advocates do not have science on their side. For instance, Sara McLanahan at Princeton University and her colleagues have found that boys who are raised by single mothers are twice as likely to end up in prison by age 32, that girls who are born outside of marriage are three times as likely to have a teenage pregnancy, and that teens born outside of marriage are about twice as likely to drop out of high school

It’s amusing when the usual suspects say nonsense: “policymakers and researchers need to discard one-size-fits-all generalizations about the causes, consequences, risks and benefits of different family forms.” Amusing but a 40% illegitimacy rate is no laughing matter. We wonder what contemporary artists think about this. (Haven’t we written this before?) Look no further than here, here, or perhaps most symbolically, here. A serious teaching moment squandered.