No talks can succeed until Hamas and a strong majority of Palestinians are willing to accept a two-state solution, and that has never been the case. Moreover, everyone with a brain knows that Hamas would use the occasion of the talks to kill Jews, which of course has already happened.

Question: was it an immoral (as well as cynical) decision on the part of the administration to hold these high profile, media-event talks, knowing that they would result in multiple slayings of innocent people?

The Federal Trade Commission is once again handing out subpoenas to companies that market food to children and teens. Three years after initially delivering what is technically known as “orders to file special report” to 44 marketers, the FTC last week began sending subpoenas to 48 companies…

Twelve companies on this year’s list are new, but 36 companies are once again receiving subpoenas — including Yum Brands, which was called out by FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz in a December 2009 speech in which he said, “Many companies that market heavily to children and teens have yet to join or make a commitment. Why, for instance, hasn’t Yum Brands, with its KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut chains, stepped up? Or Chuck E. Cheese and IHOP? Or the marketers of Air Heads and Baby Bottle Pops?”

Unlike the companies the FTC sues, the FTC’s own 80-page Annual Report has no financial disclosures. These have to be found elsewhere. The FTC has 1200 employees or so and a budget that amounts to $260,000 for each person employed.

The FTC is not the biggest source of waste in Washington of course. But it seems like a no-brainer to us that its budget and personnel could be substantially if it is spending its time investigating Chuck E. Cheese. HT: GP

as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad. They have met every test that they faced. Now, it is our turn. Now, it is our responsibility to honor them by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for –- the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.

Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work. To strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy. We must jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil. We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs. This will be difficult. But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as President.

It isn’t rocket science to fix the economy — heck, we could do it ourselves if given the opportunity. But this crew hasn’t operated a lemonade stand amongst the lot of them. Help!!!!!!!!! (HT: Ace)

in its application to the Securities and Exchange Commission — which, guess what, will come through just in time to make an IPO possible before the November elections! — GM admits that its “disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting are currently not effective.” And this “could materially affect our financial condition and ability to carry out our business plan.”

Companies include all kinds of outlandish mea-culpas in their IPO applications to cover their derrières in the event of investor lawsuits. However, this one goes to the heart of the information that investors need to determine whether GM is a good investment, especially since it is going public after only two good quarters as opposed to the usual four…

outgoing CEO Ed Whitacre…thinks that the IPO is a dumb idea. He apparently wanted to wait until GM could command a better share price and then have the company go fully public at once instead of in several installments as per the current plan. Whitacre expressed his misgivings at a recent Management Briefing Seminar in Michigan’s Traverse City, according to Sean McAlinden of the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research. “And then 48 hours later he was gone,” McAlinden says.

Same old, same old. Everything is political with these guys (you’d think they would be better at it!). First there’s the new and even more absurd Arab / Israeli peace talks in September. At the end of October there might be a GM IPO to celebrate the Dear Leader and his heavenly accomplishments. What’s planned for the beginning of October we wonder….

This video, via Powerline, shows some splendid chaps raising money in the US for Hamas. And here’s another splendid chap: Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi. And the poor lambs are all victims, don’t you know. This weird 30 / 70 America, where a smallish group in the political/educational/media establishment preach nonsense to the majority, is inherently unstable. It sure feels like things are going to go all one way or all the other, and soon.

One adviser at the time said Mr. Obama calculated that an open-ended commitment would undermine the rest of his agenda. “Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” the adviser said. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”…

A former adviser to the president, who like others insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the situation candidly, said that Mr. Obama’s relationship with the military was “troubled” and that he “doesn’t have a handle on it.” The relationship will be further tested by year’s end when Mr. Obama evaluates his Afghanistan strategy in advance of his July deadline to begin pulling out.

If the NYT report is accurate, whatever domestic political issues are the administration’s priorities in December 2010 will determine war policy for next year. How reassuring for soldiers and military families.

Obama’s behavior is even more bizarre and disgraceful when it is obvious that the administration should have been focusing in the national jobs emergency instead of the economically ruinous sideshow that became Obamacare. HT: BOTW

Obama doubled down on his support for a mosque and community center planned for a site two blocks north of ground zero in lower Manhattan — and denied reports that he tried to back away from backing the controversial project. “I didn’t walk it back it all,” he said.

It sure sounded that way to us, but perhaps we’re too obtuse to understand him.

NEWSWEEK Poll: Democrats May Not Be Headed for Midterm Bloodbath…Obama’s approval continues to slide, but Bush’s legacy still haunts the GOP…Democrats’ perceived weakness may not be so simple for the GOP to capitalize on this fall. Republican leaders still must deal with the Bush legacy, which 38 percent fault for today’s economic problems (compared with 19 percent who fault Obama’s policies). The public also strongly opposes extending the Bush tax cuts

On the other hand, that was a pretty large (here and here) and fired-up crowd the other day. We’ll see who’s right shortly.

Two political foes –- Glenn Beck and the Rev. Al Sharpton Jr. -– are gathering hundreds of thousands of their supporters on the National Mall today for simultaneous rallies commemorating the anniversary of the March on Washington. The Tea Party faithful assembled before the steps of the Lincoln Memorial this morning waiting for speeches from their superstars, Mr. Beck and Sarah Palin…In a counter-protest, Mr. Sharpton and other civil rights activists will march from Dunbar High School in Northwest Washington to the construction site of the new King memorial…Between the two events, hundreds of thousands of people could swarm the Mall.

To be fair to the Times, its follow-up piece was a little clearer on the numbers: “Beck…event organizers put the number of attendees at 500,000; NBC News said it was closer to 300,000…Across town, several hundred people packed a football field at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School.” Hard to spin a disparity like that.

Given what we now know about the monolithic and rather militant partisanship of the media, the Katrina narrative seems even worse than it was at the time. People had adequate notice to get out of New Orleans, but did not, and the local political officials were grossly negligent. Mayor Nagin’s behavior was utterly incompetent, and the deplorable Blanco’s first acts were to keep the feds out and hire a Democratic consultant to shape the media messaging. (Remember how Blanco stiffed both the President and Mayor Nagin at a critical juncture?) But turn on the TV or read the paper and it was all Bush’s fault.

Would it surprise anyone to learn that there was active collusion between Democratic politicians and the MSM to make Bush look bad? And yet the media today seem to be totally unable to control the narrative in a way that helps their team, as the polling results above show. No wonder they have gone berserk.

have repudiated the national idea. This repudiation is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the second world war, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political élites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognised: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people — intellectuals especially — tend to become arrested.

It is no accident that, while most of America toils by the sweat of its brow to make a profit, the faculty lounge and the newsroom seem a world apart from business. So perhaps it is only natural that it is now, when economic conditions are difficult, that the distinctions between the two worlds have become so plain.

70% of Americans don’t want to be ruled by the 30% or so that think they are part of an elite, and it has driven the 30% bonkers. HT: BOTW

In 2008 16 million African Americans voted out of 131 million total voters, and 96% of this group voted for Obama. If African-Americans have continued that level of support until now, it would put some interesting numbers into play.

Since African-Americans comprised about 12% of voters in 2008, and were nearly unanimous in supporting Obama, the President’s approval numbers would be almost 12% lower among the rest of the electorate if he retained the loyalty of this core group of supporters. In other words, his support among non-African-American likely voters would be around 35%.

35% is an interesting number because the number of people who favor Obama/Democrat/MSM policies (suing Arizona, favoring the Ground Zero mosque, enacting Obamacare, opposing Prop 8, etc.) is consistent with a popularity rating in the mid-30′s. Prop 8 is an interesting example, since 70% of black voters supported that initiative.

Would it surprise anyone if the key support demographics of young voters in 2008 (who aren’t that likely to vote in 2010), and African-American voters, who may like Obama but oppose many of his policies, artificially skew the President’s approval numbers to make him seem more popular than he actually is?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays — particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

We think that Democrats and the media have been surprised that the old way of silencing the opposition finally and all of a sudden stopped working, and that this explains (in part) why they have become really unhinged about the Ground Zero mosque.

The process began when the Tea Party = Racist meme failed, most notably in the shameful attack launched against the Obamacare protesters early this year. People are tired of being talked down to and lied about (it’s gotten so very, very old). Moreover, when these citizens looked around and saw that they were a pretty strong majority on issue after issue, there was no reason to put up with the accusations anymore. And so their betters are reduced to nothing more than calling them “freakin’ morons.”

The people who spend day in and day out thinking this way must be really charming dinner companions. (Speaking of charming companions, the nations comprising the UN Council on Human Rights include some of the worst of the worst.) The report is incredibly tacky and self-serving of course — bonus points for guessing how many times The Exalted One is referred to by name.

The results above are from a CBS poll. The most interesting aspect of this matter to us continues to be that the MSM almost unanimously support a position opposed by a supermajority of Americans — and feel perfectly free to insult their fellow citizens in vile terms (and in ways that are often comically wrong). It’s nice to finally know, once and for all, what the media really think about ordinary Americans. The MSM need never be taken seriously again. (BTW, it would be nice if CBS could learn to spell “don’t”.)

A Republican civil war is raging, with righter-than-thou conservatives dominating more and more primaries in a fight for the party’s soul. And the Democrats hope to benefit…tea party-backed candidates might be a godsend to desperate Democrats elsewhere — in Nevada, Florida and perhaps Kentucky, where the Democrats portray GOP nominees as too extreme for their states…

That’s “the Republican tea party” that’s “offering more of the past but on steroids” and is “out of step with where the American people are,” Vice President Joe Biden told the party’s rank and file last week.

Is that so?

A Summer of Recovery…With tens of thousands of projects funded and millions of Americans on the job today, it’s hard to believe that it’s only been 16 months since President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And with so many jobs saved and created already, you might think that the Recovery Act’s greatest impact is behind us. But it’s not. As the summer heats up, it is becoming clear that it could quite possibly be the most active season yet when it comes to recovering our economy…

with thousands of road, bridge, rail and housing projects –- like the one I saw today -– under construction across the country this summer, the American people will get to see first-hand the full force of Recovery Act dollars being put to work in their community – including at Wayland Village – making long-overdue infrastructure improvements, creating new opportunities for local economic growth and supporting well-paid jobs. I am proud to say that the Recovery Act is working!

Yeah, some summer of recovery. How’s that 20% unemployment rate among prime aged men working out for the country?

“I can tell you definitively that it costs $1 billion more per factory for me to build, equip, and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States,” Otellini said. The rub: Ninety percent of that additional cost of a $4 billion factory is not labor but the cost to comply with taxes and regulations that other nations don’t impose.

(Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers elaborated on this in an interview with CNET, saying the problem is not higher U.S. wages but anti-business laws: “The killer factor in California for a manufacturer to create, say, a thousand blue-collar jobs is a hostile government that doesn’t want you there and demonstrates it in thousands of ways.”)

“If our tax rate approached that of the rest of the world, corporations would have an incentive to invest here,” Otellini said. But instead, it’s the second highest in the industrialized world, making the United States a less attractive place to invest — and create jobs — than places in Europe and Asia that are “clamoring” for Intel’s business.

Fixing the economy is a hard slog, but it’s not rocket science. But if you’ve chosen advisors who know nothing about the business of America, as Obama has……well, it’s just too depressing to think about.

here is Rauf’s editorial on the upheaval that followed the brutal hijacking of the Iranian elections in 2009. Regarding President Obama, he advised that: He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution — to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faquih, that establishes the rule of law.

Coyly untranslated here (perhaps for “outreach” purposes), Vilayet-i-faquih is the special term promulgated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to describe the idea that all of Iranian society is under the permanent stewardship (sometimes rendered as guardianship) of the mullahs. Under this dispensation, “the will of the people” is a meaningless expression, because “the people” are the wards and children of the clergy. It is the justification for a clerical supreme leader, whose rule is impervious to elections and who can pick and choose the candidates and, if it comes to that, the results.

It is extremely controversial within Shiite Islam. (Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, for example, does not endorse it.) As for those numerous Iranians who are not Shiites, it reminds them yet again that they are not considered to be real citizens of the Islamic Republic. I do not find myself reassured by the fact that Imam Rauf publicly endorses the most extreme and repressive version of Muslim theocracy…

Let us by all means make the “Ground Zero” debate a test of tolerance. But this will be a one-way street unless it is to be a test of Muslim tolerance as well.

Hitchens mentions Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who is a rather remarkable man. Also remarkable nine years after 9-11 is that most Americans have very little understanding of the cultures of traditional Islamic societies. The media’s willful ignorance has been on display in its unappealing lectures to the majority of Americans.

“I don’t think the Tea Party movement has much currency in Alaska,” says Ivan Moore, an independent pollster based in Anchorage. Moore’s poll in July showed Miller down by 32 points, and other polls have come up with similar numbers. “From the very beginning, he has positioned himself so far to the right of the ideological spectrum and attached himself to the Tea Party movement, which even in Alaska is perceived as being a pretty extreme right organization,” Moore says.

And Palin’s endorsement hasn’t helped, Moore adds. According to a Dittman Research poll conducted in April, 52 percent of Alaskans hold a negative opinion of Palin. “When someone with those kinds of numbers endorses someone for public office, believe me, the effect is on the whole negative,” says Moore…

Steve Wackowski, a campaign spokesman for Murkowski, agrees that backing from Palin and the Tea Party Express is more of a liability for Miller than anything else. “It turns Alaskans off when outside groups from the Lower 48 like this California Tea Party Express come out and try to tell Alaskans how to vote and what they should be doing,” says Wackowski.

As of this writing, Miller is ahead by 2000 votes. Win or lose, however, pollster Ivan Moore should be looking for a new job and Slate should be looking for some new editors.

The linchpin of WikiLeaks’s financial network is Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation. WikiLeaks encourages donors to contribute to its account at the foundation, which under German law can’t publicly disclose the names of donors. Because the foundation “is not an operational concern, it can’t be sued for doing anything. So the donors’ money is protected, in other words, from lawsuits,” Mr. Assange said.

The German foundation is only one piece of the WikiLeaks network. “We’re registered as a library in Australia, we’re registered as a foundation in France, we’re registered as a newspaper in Sweden,” Mr. Assange said. WikiLeaks has two tax-exempt charitable organizations in the U.S., known as 501C3s, that “act as a front” for the website, he said. He declined to give their names, saying they could “lose some of their grant money because of political sensitivities.”

Mr. Assange said WikiLeaks gets about half its money from modest donations processed by its website, and the other half from “personal contacts,” including “people with some millions who approach us and say ‘I’ll give you 60,000 or 10,000,’ ” he said, without specifying a currency.

Kind of sounds like an organized crime syndicate, doesn’t it? Belmont Club has a lot more on the Professional Left.

One possibility is that it doesn’t make sense, and that we are witnessing a series of spectacular blunders on the part of the administration and the Democrat Party. But there’s another possibility as well. If the administration’s roots come from the far left and if there is an iron will to advance that agenda after November, having an obstructionist Congress is far from the worst thing that could happen to the Obama administration.

If we were the President and a committed radical, and if we also knew that the media would give us cover by calling our opponents every name in the book (as they have recently), we’d chart a bold course. We’d create millions of new instant citizens to support our plans. It would be an incredibly risky stroke, but the dividends would be fantastic if we got away with it.

(Final point: scenarios like this are the stuff of fiction of course. Hmmm, fiction, where have we seen that before?)

The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment. The dispute over the Islamic center has tripped some deep national lunacy. The unbottled anger and suspicion concerning ground zero show that many Americans haven’t flushed the trauma of 9/11 out of their systems — making them easy prey for fearmongers.

Many people still have a confused view of Muslims, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia.

It is a prejudice stoked by Rush Limbaugh, who mocks “Imam Obama” as “America’s first Muslim president,” and by the evangelist Franklin Graham, who bizarrely told CNN’s John King: “I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father, like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother.” Graham added: “The teaching of Islam is to hate the Jew, to hate the Christian, to kill them. Their goal is world domination.”

A poll last week by the Pew Research Center tracked a strange spike in the number of Americans who believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Obama is a Muslim. And even the ones who don’t think he’s a Muslim don’t necessarily believe he’s a Christian.

(C. Edmund Wright has a response to the Times and similar outlets in the AT.) Not to be outdone by the Times, CNN, which previously reported that seven out of ten Americans oppose the project, has a pictorial history of American religious intolerance posted now.

There sure is a crack-up going on, as Maureen Dowd said. However, the crack-up seems to us to be that of the MSM, so shocked to find that the vast majority of their countrymen are sick and tired of being insulted, lectured and talked down to by people who, for no good reason, are convinced of their own importance and moral superiority.

Indeed, it probably goes further than that. We think there is the shocking realization by the MSM that they find themselves with so little power in setting the journalistic agenda and dictating what the public should think. Note Dowd’s and Rich’s ascribing the political opinions of a supermajority of Americans to the influence of a cable news channel and a talk show host. The MSM have lost their power so they think it has flowed into some other centralized source, when in fact they have been undone by the decentralization of news availability. No wonder they sound so over-the-top and lost.

(More: Richard Cohen in the WaPo and a report from NPR make the Times commentators look almost moderate by comparison. HT: BOTW)

Obama’s relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides.

In one sense, Obama’s journey toward the cultural and political center is not unusual among national politicians. But its velocity is…The relationship with Ayers gives context to his recent past in Hyde Park politics. It’s milieu in which a former violent radical was a stalwart of the local scene, not especially controversial.

It’s also a scene whose liberal ideological features — while taken for granted by the Chicago press corps that knows Obama best — provides a jarring contrast with Obama’s current, anti-ideological stance.

We read a piece that said the discussion of Obama-Ayers had matters backwards: the interesting question wasn’t why Obama got mixed up with Ayers, it was why Ayers bothered to get mixed up with Obama. If you ask the question that way, its meaning becomes quite different.

For example, what price did Ayers charge Obama for editing/ghosting “Dreams”, as Jack Cashill has asserted and Ayers has admitted? And don’t this scene and this scene seem a little different to you, given all that is transpiring in America today? (HT: Larwyn)

Are One-Quarter of Americans Freakin’ Morons?…That’s not a rhetorical question, although the way some people have reacted to yesterday’s TIME and Pew polls about the percentage of Americans who think Obama is a Muslim, I wouldn’t be surprised if they took it as such. Sure, it’s possible that one-in-four (or five, depending on the poll) Americans actually believe in their hearts of hearts that Obama is a Muslim, despite the fact that he became a Christian in his twenties, has spoken during the presidential campaign and since about his Christian faith — even referencing his belief in “our risen Savior” — and attends Christian worship services.

He is not, despite what Franklin Graham thinks, a Muslim who converted to Christianity. If anything, Obama was a secular agnostic by default who became a Christian once he reached adulthood and started thinking seriously about faith.

There’s something odd about the tone of this piece. Its author Amy Sullivan is so insistent and categorical in her writing. What’s up with that? And then there’s the matter of TIME creating the basis for a story — it ran the poll and asked the question after all — and then shrieking about the results. It’s like TIME had an agenda or something.

As for the issue at hand, we don’t care whether Obama is Zoroastrian — we just wish he knew as much about events in American history like the Berlin Airlift and D-Day as he obviously does about Islam. (Super fun bonus: American Jews leaving the Democrat Party in droves.)

“I’m not ruling out doing something I’ve spent my whole adult life doing,” Blagojevich said when asked about a possible return to politics. “I believe some of the greatest stories in history are some of the great comebacks. You think about Winston Churchill, I mean he spent years in the political wilderness…If Churchill can comeback from something like that, when I’m vindicated, I certainly don’t write myself off.”

Blagojevich and Churchill — two words we never thought we’d see so close together. Explanation here.

The breakthrough after a nearly two-year hiatus in face-to-face negotiations brings the two sides back to where they were when the last direct talks began in November 2007, near the end of the Bush administration. Those talks broke down after Israel’s 2008 military operation in Gaza, followed by Netanyahu’s election last year on a much tougher platform than his predecessor.

Friday’s announcement came after months of shuttle diplomacy by the Obama administration’s Mideast envoy, former Sen. George Mitchell. It also followed a period of chilly U.S. relations with Netanyahu, primarily over expansion of Jewish housing on disputed land.

Under the agreement, Obama will hold separate discussions with Netanyahu and Abbas on Sept. 1 and then host the dinner, which will also be attended by Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

Egypt and Jordan already have peace deals with Israel and will play a crucial support role in the new talks. Also invited is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the special representative of the “Quartet” of Mideast peacemakers — the U.S., the U.N., the European Union and Russia.

On Sept. 2, Clinton will bring Abbas and Netanyahu together for the first formal round of direct talks since December 2008. At that point the parties will decide where and when to hold later rounds as well as lay out what is to be discussed. U.S. officials have said following rounds are likely to be held in Egypt.

This is just more expensive rubbish, and it does the US no good to lend whatever credibility it has left to this charade. Here’s our thought on when peace talks might be useful: when Palestinian maps of the Middle East include a distinct country called Israel, there might be some basis for talking. Until then, let’s save time, money and credibility and skip this farce.

This is from a ppt on Obamacare based on polling by Democratic firms. Note the last point. It stands in contrast to the way the legislation was sold by the flim-flam man and the media. If this scam were in the private sector, people would be in jail by now.

he has systematically put forth policies the American people do not want. The net result is a crisis of confidence and legitimacy in the American political system and our institutions. The president is now at record low levels of approval — close to 40 percent overall, and in the mid- to low 30s among swing voters…

The Benenson survey shows that the administration’s approach is fundamentally at variance with the one voters desire. Voters favor tax cuts over government investment by a clear majority and are looking for candidates and parties that champion fiscal discipline, limited government, deficit reduction, a free market, pro-growth agenda, and comprehensive plans to create employment opportunities, enable entrepreneurship, and aid business creation.

Indeed, when asked which approach to strengthening the economy they prefer, 54 percent of the respondents in the Third Way/Benenson poll preferred cutting taxes for businesses to help jump-start private sector job creation and economic growth, while 32 percent said they prefer making new government investments…

the swing voters who hold the fate of the Democratic Party in their hands care about three things first and foremost: reigniting the economy, deficit reduction, and job creation. Looking ahead to the November midterm elections, more than twice as many voters said they would prefer a candidate for Congress who will start from scratch with new ideas to shrink government, cut taxes, and grow the economy (64 percent) over one who will stick with Obama’s economic policies (30 percent).

What the heck is going on? It is perfectly obvious what needs to be done to fix the economy, and yet we get weird distraction after weird distraction from the administration. One day it’s Arizona, the next day it’s a mosque. Some days we think there’s a super-clever plan behind all this, because it is otherwise nearly impossible to explain the cosmic incompetence of Obama and his staff.

The only thing that is perfectly clear at this point is that the media’s contempt for ordinary Americans is now no longer hidden and is plainly on display. That’s some kind of progress at least.

it’s time for New Yorkers to stop talking haughtily about the prejudices of flyover country. According to Fox, 30 percent of Americans support building the mosque near Ground Zero. In New York City, according to Marist, it’s 34 percent. That, evidently, is the margin of blue state decency. Turns out that when push comes to shove, folks in the Big Apple are about as concerned about the rights of Muslims as folks in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Who says we’re a nation divided, that we can’t find common ground? Almost a decade later, we’ve finally done it: The memory of September 11 has brought us together again.

We are beginning to have a theory about the ferocity and volume of the Democrat-Media-Left’s politically crazy opposition to what 7 out of 10 Americans think.

In the wake of 9-11 we began to see lapel flags on politicians and newsmen, and it often seemed out of character: They had to act like they approved of the warmongering rubes that comprised the vast majority of Americans at that time. But it’s been almost a decade since 9-11. We believe we’re now seeing what many on the Left really thought in those bad old days but were afraid to express, and that’s why they’re doubly angry and loud today.

There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded,

A mere 27% of New Yorkers support the project, and Pelosi goes ballistic? This is crazy. And we suppose she can investigate Harry Reid while she’s at it.

A recent CNN poll found that 68 percent of Americans do not want a mosque built close to ground zero. Which should mean: end of story. That’s all she wrote. Let’s move on to the next crisis. It appears, however, that at least on this occasion, Obama does not care what the polls say…

Maybe Obama is disconnected. After all, as a former professor of constitutional law, he actually knows what the Constitution says. His opponents have no such fetters. They know what they want the Constitution to say: yes to guns, no to gay marriage and never to mosques close to hallowed ground, though churches and synagogues are OK. What’s so wrong with that? I’ll bet they poll great.

Actually, the polling does not support Simon’s contention. What is most fascinating about the mosque controversy is that so many in the media — simultaneously and all of a sudden — have no reluctance to display their revulsion at what a supermajority of Americans think. It feels like some turning point has been reached, though we’re not quite sure what it all means yet.

These supporters of the President seem a bit peeved. Via Jim Hoft.

A few points seem noteworthy to us. First, these writers all acknowledge that a huge majority — two-thirds — of the American people oppose the WTC area project. Second, these writers all ascribe the basest motives possible to these opponents, a completely unwarranted inference. Hell hath no fury like a MSM viewpoint scorned.

What does it say about how those in the media regard themselves that they think it is proper for them to be lecturing a supermajority of Americans, and to do so in the most insulting terms possible?

Washington is hard to govern, above all, because of the radical growth in the scope of the federal government’s responsibilities — it’s an obvious fact, but it’s where explanations must begin. On the eve of World War II, F.D.R. had six high-level aides who carried the title “administrative assistant to the president.” Harry Truman, after the war, had 12 of them: they met every morning in a semicircle around his desk. There are now upwards of 100 people who have some variation on “assistant to the president” in their titles.

And almost none of them have any real world experience. No wonder things are going so well.

First, Obama was able to cast himself as a reasonable man, capable of seeing both sides of an issue. Second, he was able to cast himself as a decent and charitable man, capable of seeing the good in the fiercest of clashing adversaries. Third, he was able to cast himself as an intelligent man (albeit in the facile manner of a bright college sophomore or a slightly above average law student), capable of finding similarities where lesser intellects can spot only differences. Finally, and most importantly, Obama the synthesizer cast himself as a problem solver. His seeming ability to identify common ground was not just an exercise in intellectual nimbleness and human decency. For many, it held out the promise that longstanding conflicts might be made to recede.

But now most everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows they were conned in 2008 by a guy whose actual beliefs bear no resemblance to the words the speechwriters put in his mouth. Question: what do you call a guy who disses Israel in words and deeds, bows to the Saudi king, appeases Iran’s mullahs, changes NASA’s mission in a very weird way, has senior officials legitimizing Jihad, and endorses the adhan at Ground Zero? Answer: not your average American.

Somehow the US has suddenly become Albania or some other moth-ridden, impoverished eastern bloc satellite of the USSR, if the Chevy Volt video below is any indication. This is a devolution so steep and so swift it’s hard to believe. HT: Iowahawk

PS: it’s hard to imagine the America of today (at least as it is currently being governed) having the will and wherewithal to muster the effort that ultimately resulted in VJ-Day.

In the course of a nice speech at an Iftar dinner event, the President said this:

As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.

“The writ of the Founders must endure” — funny stuff, coming from this guy. We’re not going to join the political discussion of this issue, though we’ll make an observation. Even assuming the very best of intentions of the builders of the Ground Zero Mosque, a questionable premise, their aesthetic judgment is appalling in building the 15 storey structure two blocks from this; moreover, it will probably be pretty creepy for many New Yorkers to hear the call to prayer five times a day at the WTC site.

What’s most interesting to us is the consistency of Barack Obama in taking positions opposed by landslide majorities of Americans, in this case 68% or so. In a situation where Bill Clinton would triangulate and figure out some formula to make a majority at least somewhat satisfied, Obama stands above it all and makes categorical pronouncements opposed by a supermajority of US citizens. So once again we are drawn to wonder whether Obama is politically suicidal or has a grand scheme to make this all work in his favor.

the “non-Hispanic white” electorate will likely slip to 70%, or perhaps slightly lower. If the president performs as poorly in the white community as current polls indicate, he will still win an electoral majority as long as he commands the same percentage of nonwhite voters (83%) that he won in 2008. This seems entirely possible, and based on current polls, it looks likely.

The Quinnipiac survey indicates that Mr. Obama still enjoys huge popularity among people of color, winning his trial heat against an unspecified Republican 44 to 1 among blacks (87% to 2%) and nearly 2 to 1 among Latinos (49% to 26%). In other words, the president maintains his near unanimous support in the black community and has dipped only slightly among Hispanics, where he drew a commanding 67% of the vote in 2008.

Only 65% of Latino voters expressed a candidate preference in the survey’s trial heat. That means if Mr. Obama can sway the bulk of the 35% of Latinos who say they “don’t know” or are currently uncommitted, the president will replicate his victory formula from 2008. Undecided Hispanic citizens, representing as many as three million votes in the next election, may hold the balance of power in a competitive race.

These numbers help to explain the president’s current position on immigration reform and his efforts to block Arizona’s tough new immigration law. That legislation is overwhelmingly resented among Latino voters: 66% of Hispanics say they disapprove of it, and 71% say they don’t want a similar law in their own states.

It’s an excellent game plan — and perhaps could be made even more compelling if the President could create millions of extra voters for him by selective law enforcement policies or perhaps simply by fiat. The phrase “President for life” has such a nice ring to it. But this is just a fantasy. After all, things like this could never happen in America, could they?

Fifty-six percent (56%) of Democrats feel the country is heading in the right direction.

Ninety-two percent (92%) of Republicans and 70% of voters not affiliated with either political party feel the country is heading down the wrong track. Sixty-five percent (65%) of all voters say the country is heading down the wrong track

What is astounding and mystifying is that, on issue after issue, 60-70% of the country is opposed to what Congress and the Obama administration are doing, but these politicians just don’t care what a landslide majority of American citizens think. One way or another, this will not end well.

What do we Mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington. The Records of thirteen Legislatures, the Pamphlets, Newspapers in all the Colonies ought to be consulted, during that Period to ascertain the Steps by which the Public Opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the Authority of Parliament over the Colonies.

Since we cannot afford the future that lies in front of us, great changes are inevitable. How ugly things get and whether traditional American values prevail are unknown at this point, however.

The economic problems of the United States are tough but correctable. It’s not rocket science. But this administration is unique in the ignorance of its key people about business. And there’s an even more fundamental problem than that. Accounting is the language of business, and there is a great divide between those who can speak the language and those who can’t.

We’re willing to bet that very few in the administration and the media covering them are knowledgeable about even the most basic tenets of accounting. And if you can’t even speak the language, how on earth can you possibly understand and solve the problem?

the financial projections shown in this report for Medicare do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range (as a result of the unsustainable reductions in physician payment rates) or the long range (because of the strong likelihood that the statutory reductions in price updates for most categories of Medicare provider services will not be viable).

I encourage readers to review the “illustrative alternative” projections that are based on more sustainable assumptions for physician and other Medicare price updates.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Right now 2+2=4 is relegated to the footnotes. How long will it survive at all? HT: JOM

The other day we saw an internal administration memorandum outlining various steps to grant amnesty in one way or another to most illegal aliens in the US, using methods that specifically bypass Congress. Today we see that an AFL-CIO unit that represents ICE workers is accusing the senior management of ICE of working pretty much full time on amnesty and related programs. The AFL-CIO claims that the administration has created, in effect, “amnesty through enforcement policy.”

One explanation of the administration’s seeming lack of concern about the drubbing that Democrats are going to take in the fall is that it provides an excuse for the administration to do more and more by fiat because the nasty racist Republicans in Congress are blocking all the good things that Obama wants to do. Imagine if that were true and opposing Arizona’s law was not a mistake but part of a plan — it’s not a bug, it’s a feature! (HT’s: Ace, AT)

The list of things to do is rather obvious: (a) keep tax rates low; (b) cut unproductive government spending (a la Chris Christie) wherever possible; (c) create incentives for creating jobs in the US rather than overseas; (d) suspend certain burdensome regulations and set up an emergency review process so that companies can exploit domestic versus foreign capacity; (e) seek to exploit areas where the US has low or competitive factor costs and where we can export or at least reduce imports; (f) recognize that the borrow from China / buy from China model is broken now and for all time, and aggressively try to turn the ship of state around before truly terrible things happen; etc.

Taking these steps and others is a 24/7/365 job. And here’s the critical point: even if all these steps are taken, it’s going to be a very hard slog to reverse the destructive trends that imperil the nation’s finances and the livelihoods of the people. In all likelihood, it’s going to be very slow and painful, even if we take all the right steps. And yet, the administration and Congress focus either on inanities or on destructive policies, and there is zero evidence that the White House even understands the depth and severity of the problems and the intense focus needed to change course and make things better.

What needs to be done to restore prosperity to the United States seems obvious — simple to state if complex to execute. The most peculiar thing is that there is so little outcry, among Democrats who surely know better, at the catatonic non-response of the Obama administration to a crisis of truly historic proportions.

Related reading: Paul Ryan’s roadmap.

Perhaps the laziest characterization of the US is as a “superpower.” Part of that no doubt comes from having a substantial nuclear arsenal (weapons that might never be used, even when it would be completely appropriate and necessary to do so — and very likely not by this President). Part of the superpower reputation comes from having the ability to project military power through the US Navy. But things are changing: AP:

Nothing projects U.S. global air and sea power more vividly than supercarriers. Bristling with fighter jets that can reach deep into even landlocked trouble zones, America’s virtually invincible carrier fleet has long enforced its dominance of the high seas. China may soon put an end to that.

U.S. naval planners are scrambling to deal with what analysts say is a game-changing weapon being developed by China — an unprecedented carrier-killing missile called the Dong Feng 21D that could be launched from land with enough accuracy to penetrate the defenses of even the most advanced moving aircraft carrier at a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers (900 miles). Analysts say final testing of the missile could come as soon as the end of this year, though questions remain about how fast China will be able to perfect its accuracy to the level needed to threaten a moving carrier at sea.

The weapon, a version of which was displayed last year in a Chinese military parade, could revolutionize China’s role in the Pacific balance of power, seriously weakening Washington’s ability to intervene in any potential conflict over Taiwan or North Korea. It could also deny U.S. ships safe access to international waters near China’s 11,200-mile (18,000-kilometer) -long coastline…the conventionally-armed Dong Feng 21D’s uniqueness is in its ability to hit a powerfully defended moving target with pin-point precision…

Funded by annual double-digit increases in the defense budget for almost every year of the past two decades, the Chinese navy has become Asia’s largest and has expanded beyond its traditional mission of retaking Taiwan to push its sphere of influence deeper into the Pacific and protect vital maritime trade routes.

“The Navy has long had to fear carrier-killing capabilities,” said Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the nonpartisan, Washington-based Center for a New American Security. “The emerging Chinese antiship missile capability, and in particular the DF 21D, represents the first post-Cold War capability that is both potentially capable of stopping our naval power projection and deliberately designed for that purpose.”

As you can see from the chart at the top of this piece, the US has 9 operational nuclear aircraft carriers deployed around the world. Sink two of them and they are no longer capable of projecting offensive power in our opinion, since protecting the ships themselves would become job one. And by the way, the US Navy is not what you think it is. While the US Navy was operating 6,768 ships on V-J Day in August 1945, the current fleet is fewer than 300 ships. The word “superpower” should be retired.

there is a tradition is this country of a sort of old school, Tory, elitist conservatism and there was a strain of that in Bill Buckley’s conservatism that he revived after the War. I think his was an idealized version of it. He was the son of a wealthy Catholic businessman, more cosmopolitan and intellectual than the crusty old WASP Bonesman conservatism that he seem to affect. Though, in truth, I think the Buckley style was just an invention of his own, analogous to the partly fictional Old North Country aristocratic Catholic style that Evelyn Waugh invented and affected in Brideshead Revisited. This is the style of a conscious traditionalism and it is has long been a part of anything you could call conservatism in this country and personally I think a very valuable part.

But, and this is a critical point I think, something new and interesting is happening at the moment in this country, or maybe something not so new, but happening in a new way. And here one has to be careful not to go all dopey and Noonanesque. I don’t think any of it makes sense except against the background of new communications technologies that are just transforming our society. Progressive historians love to go on about the transportation and communications revolution of the nineteenth century, but we are really in the middle of a gigantic communications revolution now.

One thing we are seeing is an enormous expansion of the intellectual engagement of ordinary people, many of whom turn out to be not so ordinary, in national politics. Legacy institutions and affiliations and the prestige and style that go with them mean something but not what they used to. But it’s not all good. The disruption caused by this revolution creates opportunities for all sorts of people. Indeed, I think our current president is one who would never have stepped into an office he really is not qualified for except for the fact that we are living through a time of profound disruption in many ways. And one of the things that means is that many shrill, rude, out of key and downright offensive voices are getting heard that before would have been filtered out by various intermediary institutions. That’s not an unalloyed good.

Just to take one of Steve’s points — I agree with him in a general way that the legacy conservative media of talk radio (if this is what he is saying, otherwise it is just me) has lost a lot of its freshness and has matured into a medium that leaves a lot to be desired as any sort of thought leader or opinion shaper. I’m reluctant to be specific but I will just say a lot of time, right wing radio talkers just seem to be selling schtick, using conservatism the way some insincere televangelists use religion. And that’s to be expected. If people were angels, we should indeed support progressive government. It’s only in the real world that we need such strict limits on power.

Or take Sarah Palin, who graduated from the University of Idaho, whose alma mater was sung at my father’s funeral, so don’t neg the U of I around me. She’s not as well educated as Michelle Obama. She’s not as well educated as a President or Vice President should be. But had she gone to Harvard Law her ideas about the constitution would be a lot less sound than they happen to be. That is what we have come to. The prestige of such ancient institutions as we have are now used as weapons against the most fundamental principles of our frame of government and really our way of life. This means we are in a bad way.

Smith also links to other critiques of the Bainbridge piece. Word travels fast these days, doesn’t it? And that’s the point. We are in the midst of a communications revolution that we really don’t understand very well, since we have no perspective on it. But it does seem to be changing politics as we know it. We think that Missouri may be some evidence of that — getting a 71% majority on anything is most unusual, and doing so on a shoestring budget is even more unusual.

Art Laffer elaborates once again on the troubles we could avoid if we remembered the past (he leaves out some elements, however):

The Great Depression was precipitated by President Hoover in early 1930, when he signed into law the largest ever U.S. tax increase on traded products — the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. President Hoover then thought it would be clever to try to tax America into prosperity. Using many of the same arguments that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are using today, President Hoover raised the highest personal income tax rate to 63% from 24% on Jan. 1, 1932. He raised many other taxes as well.

President Roosevelt then debauched the dollar with the 1933 Bank Holiday Act and his soak-the-rich tax increase on Jan. 1, 1936. He raised the highest personal income tax rate to 79% from 63% along with a whole host of other corporate and personal tax rates as well. The U.S. economy went into a double dip depression, with unemployment rates rising again to 20% in 1938. Over the course of the Great Depression, the government raised the top marginal personal income tax rate to 83% from 24%.

Is it any wonder that the Great Depression was as long and deep as it was? Whoever heard of a country taxing itself into prosperity? Not only did taxes as a share of GDP fall, but GDP fell as well. It was a double whammy. Tax receipts from the top 1% of income earners stayed flat as a share of GDP, going to 1% in 1940 from 1.1% in 1928, but at what cost?…

As a result of higher tax rates on those people in the highest tax brackets, there will be less employment, output, sales, profits and capital gains—all leading to lower payrolls and lower total tax receipts. There will also be higher unemployment, poverty and lower incomes, all of which require more government spending. It’s a Catch-22.

Laffer says that a curiosity of tax policy is that the effects don’t happen until the changes in tax rate actually take place. So if a double-dip is in the cards, we may not actually see it until January 2010, when the tax rate increases begin to bite.

Jay Cost, like Michael Barone, sees a concentration problem for Democrats in 2010 (as we have previously noted, there has been a concentration issue for years, but voter displeasure with Bush and the GOP has muted its effect recently):

Obama’s victory was geographically narrower than Reagan’s, LBJ’s, Ike’s or FDR’s. Substantially so. Obama did much more poorly in rural and small town locales. They have a history of progressive/liberal support, but Obama was unable to place himself in the rural progressive tradition of William Jennings Bryan. This makes his coalition the most one-sided of any on the above maps. Most of his political support comes from the big cities and the inner suburbs. The exurbs, small towns, and rural areas generally voted Republican…

In fact, if you look at presidential elections going back 100 years, Obama’s is the most geographically narrow of any victors except Carter, Kennedy, and Truman – none of whom had transformative presidencies. Even Bill Clinton in 1996, whose share of the two-party vote was comparable to Obama’s, still had a geographically broader voting coalition…

Voting input inevitably determines policy output, and these maps hold the key to Reich’s disappointment with the President. In our system, it’s not just the number of votes that matter, but — thanks to Roger Sherman — how they are distributed across the several states. Obama’s urban support base was sufficient for political success in the House, which passed a very liberal health care bill last November. But rural places have greater sway in the Senate — and Obama’s weakness in rural America made for a half-dozen skittish Democrats who represent strong McCain states.

The evolving thinking on the left — “Obama should have used his campaign-trail magic to change the political dynamic” — is thus totally misguided. The “remarkable capacities he displayed during the 2008 campaign” never persuaded the constituents of the red state Democrats he had to win over. Why should they suddenly start doing so now?

Obama simply lacked the broad appeal to guide the House’s liberal proposal through the Senate. So, the result of “going big” was an initially liberal House product that then had to be watered down to win over red state Senators like Landrieu, Lincoln, Nelson, and Pryor. The end result was a compromise bill that, frankly, nobody really liked. Liberals were disappointed, tantalized as they were by the initial House product. Conservatives were wholly turned off, recognizing as they did that the guts of the bill were still liberal. And Independents and soft partisans were disgusted by congressional sausage-making and wary of the bill’s provisions.

Perhaps then it should not be surprising that an overwhelming 71% of voters in Missouri voted against the individual mandate in Obamacare, apparently including at least 1 in 8 Democrats. TIME downplayed the event, calling it “largely symbolic,” because Obamacare’s fate will be decided in court. Other media outlets said the same thing. What will they say in November if Missouri is the bellwether it so often has been?

Shortly after midnight on July 16, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez reached back in time. He presided at the exhumation of the remains of Simón Bolívar — Latin America’s greatest independence hero, who helped liberate the region from Spain in the 19th century, and the object of Chávez’s personal and political obsession.

The skeleton was pulled apart. Pieces were removed, such as teeth and bone fragments, for “testing.” The rest was put in a new coffin with the Chávez government’s seal. Chávez, who also tweeted the proceedings, gave a rambling speech in which he asked Christ to repeat his Lazarus miracle and raise the dead once more. He also apparently conversed with Bolívar’s bones.

“I had some doubts,” Chávez told his nation, paraphrasing the poet Pablo Neruda, “but after seeing his remains, my heart said, ‘Yes, it is me.’ Father, is that you, or who are you? The answer: ‘It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.’ ”

By presidential decree, every television station in Venezuela showed images of Bolívar in historic paintings, then images of the skeleton, and then images of Chávez, with the national anthem blaring. The message of this macabre parody was unmistakable: Chávez is not a follower of Bolívar — Chávez is Bolívar, reincarnated. And anyone who opposes or criticizes him is a traitor not just to Chávez but to history.

Mostly amusing. And then we recalled that the USA was on this fruitcake’s side in the matter of Honduras, and that our American government asked that “fishy” emails opposing the administration should be reported directly to the White House. And then the dreams of a tyrannical lunatic seemed not so amusing after all.

It’s a weird world out there, and it keeps getting weirder, as this screenshot of a Google autocomplete demonstrates. Here’s Google’s explanation of how autocomplete works:

In some cases, there may be a search term that seems surprising to you, but after doing some searching on the web, you may discover that it’s a popular phrase online for some reason that you didn’t anticipate. Queries in Google Suggest are algorithmically determined based on a number of objective factors (including search term popularity) without manual intervention.

Given the events of the last few days, perhaps the result isn’t so surprising after all. (And Google’s search results for itself aren’t all that flattering either. HT: JOM

just 28% of voters believe increased government spending is good for the economy…for 72% of voters, asking about a trade-off between cutting spending and helping the economy doesn’t make sense. A look at the demographics shows that the trade-off makes sense for only one group — the Political Class. Among that group, 67% believe increased government spending would be good for the economy.

Among other things, this data highlights a challenge in framing polling questions. If a question is asked in a way that doesn’t makes sense to most voters, it’s hard to put much value on the resulting data. It’s even more challenging when most in the Political Class don’t recognize the problem.

Keynesian pump-priming today has severe limitations, as we have previously discussed. The spending madness has to stop.

Empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems, including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. But this fact is rarely recognised because of our addiction to cyclical theories of history. The Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity. The sun set on the British Empire almost as suddenly. The Suez crisis in 1956 proved that Britain could not act in defiance of the US in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire…

consider Britain in the 20th century. Its real problems came after 1945, when a substantial proportion of its now immense debt burden was in foreign hands. Of the pound stg. 21 billion national debt at the end of the war, about pound stg. 3.4bn was owed to foreign creditors, equivalent to about a third of gross domestic product…

Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed in Washington, as the US contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $US1.47 trillion ($1.64 trillion), about 10 per cent of GDP, for the second year running. Since 2001, in the space of just 10 years, the federal debt in public hands has doubled as a share of GDP from 32 per cent to a projected 66 per cent next year. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections, the debt could rise above 90 per cent of GDP by 2020 and reach 146 per cent by 2030 and 344 per cent by 2050.

These sums may sound fantastic. But what is even more terrifying is to consider what ongoing deficit finance could mean for the burden of interest payments as a share of federal revenues. The CBO projects net interest payments rising from 9 per cent of revenue to 20 per cent in 2020, 36 per cent in 2030, 58 per cent in 2040 and 85 per cent in 2050. As Larry Kotlikoff recently pointed out in the Financial Times, by any meaningful measure, the fiscal position of the US is at present worse than that of Greece.

Worse than Greece — not a good situation to contemplate.

Immigration decision will erode Obama support…The Arizona law is massively popular in the United States. Over 60 percent of all American voters support it. But the president has sought and has succeeded in stopping it from taking effect. Now this majority — close to two-thirds of the electorate — that backs the law will be able to focus their blame for its non-enforcement squarely on the president of the United States.

In the long term, the Bolton decision will likely be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court and Arizona will find itself vindicated. But, in the meantime, the decision endangers the re-election chances of three Democratic Congressmen from Arizona. Their constituents will not be satisfied with statements from these Democrats supporting the Arizona law. They will become embittered because Obama’s Justice Department has overridden their will.

Why did Obama bring the suit in the first place if it hurts him? Because he was seeking to increase the turnout of Latino voters and trying to win them by the same huge margin (2:1) that they delivered to him in 2008. Since he took office, Obama’s approval among Hispanics has dropped to 54%, foreshadowing a massive abandonment of his Congressional candidates in November.

But what Obama miscalculated was the intense support from among most voters that the Arizona law has elicited. As he bid for Latino votes, he has sacrificed much of his liberal, Democratic base. This decision hurts him badly.

It does seem a conundrum, does it not? How could a savvy political team take position after position that are opposed by a majority of American voters? It seems irrational and self-destructive for a politician. Question: how does a politician solve the problem that his policies are opposed by a solid majority of existing American citizens? One possible answer: snap your fingers and create more citizens by fiat.

(a) what are the vital national interests of the US that have us spending blood and treasure in a remote, geographically difficult, primitive tribal land that al Qaeda has largely abandoned for Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, etc?
(b) what will define an American victory in an Afghanistan war, how long will it take, and what will it cost?
(c) why should the American public (let alone an unhappy volunteer fighting force) put up with Rules of Engagement that cause many American lives to be unnecessarily forfeited?

(Maybe they could also explain why it makes sense for any American to be in harm’s way in a country where things like this happen.) At the conclusion of the hour Americans would vote just like they do on American Idol and similar shows. If Obama and Petraeus can’t be clear, concise and convincing, we should declare victory and get out.

The administration had this to say according to ABC News: “U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services press secretary Christopher Bentley responded to the accusations saying, ‘nobody should mistake deliberation and exchange of ideas for final decisions. To be clear, the Department of Homeland Security will not grant deferred action or humanitarian parole to the nation’s entire illegal immigrant population’.” How comforting.