JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Sputter to stall: U.S. economy dips into danger zone for recession. “When Election Day 2012 rolls around, it will be the economy rather than the debt ceiling debate or the killing of Osama bin Laden that will most influence voters. And time is running for a dramatic turnaround that will substantially lower unemployment or boost incomes. . . . The White House and its media surrogates will continue to argue that without the $800 billion stimulus, the economy would be even worse. Their models and multipliers are never questioned. But to many Americans, it looks like the car is headed back into the ditch, if it ever got out.” Where’s my Slurpee?
I RATHER DOUBT IT: Is the problem with Congress not enough pork?
The article doesn’t really deliver on its promise regarding the collapse of political trust. But to be trusted, you have to be trustworthy. When people don’t trust you any more, they may take a while to act on it, but eventually there’s a preference cascade. Where are we on that timeline now? I’m not sure.
NOT JUST IN THE TANK — DRIVING THE TANK: #MSM reporter offers Obama #WhiteHouse helpful advice on #Twitter — and they take it. “A New York Times reporter this morning offered White House communications folks an unsolicited tip on using Twitter to drive improved public support for President Obama’s stance in the debt ceiling negotiations. And within minutes they took it.”
Like Dukakis, baby!
UPDATE: Countertweet from John Hawkins:I have a plan for a perpetual motion machine. It works, I assure you, but I can’t show it to anyone. #thatworksforobama
JAMES TARANTO: He’s Back! Obama finally bows to reality. “At the very beginning of his brief statement this morning, he complained that the Boehner plan ‘would force us to relive this crisis in just a few short months, holding our economy captive to Washington politics once again.’ Replace the phrase ‘our economy’ with ‘my re-election campaign,’ and you can see what he means.”
SOUTH CAROLINA DEMOCRATS TO NIKKI HALEY: How Dare You Consider Yourself White! Well, policing the color line is something South Carolina Democrats have been doing for 200 years. . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Whatever racial box she checked, at least she only voted once, which is more than some people can say. “While NAACP President Benjamin Jealous lashed out at new state laws requiring photo ID for voting, an NAACP executive sits in prison, sentenced for carrying out a massive voter fraud scheme . . . . in April a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots. Sowers is identified on an NAACP website as a member of the Tunica County NAACP Executive Committee.”
FORD ROBOTS GO ON STRIKE: “Production of the popular compact has reportedly been hampered by a machine that makes dashboard coverings. Apparently, the Detroit area supplier’s equipment takes unscheduled breaks, and only works intermittently. According to the Associated Press, this issue has put the hurt on Focus production, forcing Ford to fly in needed parts from European vendors in an effort to try and keep assembly moving.” Unscheduled breaks, only works intermittently — have they unionized the robots too, now?
DOES “DRIVER ASSISTANCE” MAKE US WORSE DRIVERS? “Though these ‘semiautonomous’ systems are sold as safety equipment, researchers argue that they create a sense of reliance that actually makes drivers less safe (unlike ‘secret’ safety systems like stability control and ABS, which operate consistently without the driver’s knowledge). And, somewhat counterintuitively, these researchers argue that the rise of semiautonomous driver aids actually increases the need for life-long driver education.”
WELL, THEY HAVE COMPETENT MANAGEMENT: Apple Has More Cash On Hand Than The U.S. Government. Or as the story explains: “That’s because Apple collects more money than it spends, while the U.S. government does not.”
MORE ON CONFESSED FORT-HOOD TERROR PLANNER JASON ABDO, including his antiwar activism and denuncation of “islamophobia.” Plus this: “Isn’t a phobia an irrational fear? Well if Abdo is found to have been part of a terror plot, I guess he wasn’t experiencing an irrational fear.”
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY ON THAT ATF GUN-SMUGGLING SCANDAL: THE WHITE HOUSE KNEW. “Why was a National Security Council staffer asking about an operation that no one in the upper echelons of the administration was supposed to be aware of? We find it hard to believe it was for O’Reilly’s personal amusement. Why would Newell request that he not be acknowledged as the source?”
CLAIM: President Obama Must Use 14th Amendment to Raise Debt Ceiling, Restore Confidence. I think such a move would promote the breakdown of confidence in representative government, and lead many to feel far less compelled to pay their taxes or otherwise comply with government edicts. It is, essentially, a species of taxation without representation.
BYRON YORK: In Debt Fight, Dems Reject Republican Compromise. “What about Obama? His compromises, if any, are more difficult to discern because the White House has been militantly secretive about its position. In the past few days, in fact, White House spokesman Jay Carney has gotten downright testy whenever reporters point out that Obama has never released a debt-ceiling plan, making it impossible to know exactly where he stands, and therefore whether he has compromised on any of his original positions.”
Operation Fast and Furious — the Obama administration’s lethal gun-running fiasco — keeps getting uglier and uglier.
In a series of hearings, Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Charles Grassley have been systematically dismantling the administration’s preposterous claim that no one in the Justice Department — which oversees the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — knew anything about the so-called gun-tracking operation. . . . On Tuesday, the ATF agent in charge of the Phoenix office, Bill Newell, told Issa’s House committee that he discussed the operation with the national-security director for North America, Kevin O’Reilly, an old friend, in the form of a “you didn’t get this from me” e-mail in September 2010. (The White House insists the e-mail had nothing to do with Fast and Furious, but instead concerned the larger, legitimate Project Gunrunner gun-tracking program.)
We already knew that the debacle also involved the FBI and the DEA (both part of DoJ), but Newell also revealed that even more agencies were part of the program, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Homeland Security) and the IRS.
It gets worse. Issa and Grassley also have identified a dozen Justice Department officials who they say knew about the program, including former Deputy Attorney General David Ogden and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.
Yet President Obama insists that Holder & Co. knew nothing about it.
If anyone’s feeling an uneasy soup-stain-on-shirt-front sense of embarrassment, it should be Mayor Bloomberg’s Health Department. That department has gone on a huge public campaign to encourage odium for sodium, with processed soup a designated villain, as with a notorious public-service ad showing salt crystals spraying out of a can of the product. Doesn’t seem to be working, now, does it?
In fact, the science on salt and health has long been more complicated than you might think. Per Scientific American, “In just the past few months researchers have published seemingly contradictory studies showing that excess sodium in the diet leads to heart attacks, reduces your blood pressure or has no effect at all.” This month, the venerable science monthly ran an article by Melinda Wenner Moyer under the startling headline, “It’s Time to End the War on Salt.” City health commissioner Thomas Farley must have needed reviving with smelling salts, assuming his office hasn’t tried to ban those yet.
There’s a lot of junk science in health regulation, but there’s no accountability when it’s wrong.
I don’t disparage the intentions of the 25 or so who were not willing to vote for the bill. In fact, I agree with them as to where we should end up. I disagree with them as to how to get there.
My disagreement is that they are treating this vote as the end of the line, the last chance to save this sinking ship.
That’s not my perspective. This is an opportunity to change direction of the ship, and spend the next year fighting for the types of deeper changes which will save the ship.
The Boehner bill establishes the principles of no new taxes, dollar-for-dollar offsets of debt and budget cuts, capping the growth of government, and the necessity of further cuts. The Boehner bill also establishes this agenda as the agenda for the presidential election by making sure that more hard decisions are made during the electoral season.
There is uncertainty as to what no debt ceiling raise means. Frankly, I don’t know whether it will be no big deal or catastrophe. But I am confident that regardless, it plays into Obama’s hands.
The lack of job growth, the failure of a recovery to materialize, any further economic damage, and so on, will be placed on our doorstep, however unfairly. The narrative for the presidential election will be changed dramatically, and not in a way that helps us rid ourselves of a president who is deeply committed to the expansion of government by regulation if not legislation. . . .
Passing the Boehner bill out of the House, to near certain rejection by the Senate and Obama, puts the onus for any negative consequences where it belongs, on the Democrats. But only if Republicans pass it out of the House.
Update: I should also add that some of the monied Tea Party organizations, which only to a limited extent represent the “movement,” have lost their way when they announce that they will target Allen West over his decision to vote for the Boehner bill. Allen West?
TODD ZYWICKI: FALLING FOR THE TWO-INCOME TRAP. “But here’s the catch (as I have noted previously here and here)–while that conclusion is what Professor Warren says is the upshot of her analysis and is the what appears to be the conclusion of her analysis, that is not actually what her own data actually shows. . . . I should stress that I don’t blame Caldwell at all for misunderstanding this point from The Two-Income Trap. Warren and Tyagi provide no explanation why they would present all other expenditures in terms of percentage change in dollar amounts but taxes, and taxes alone, in terms of the change in the percentage of income dedicated to taxes. . . . In fact, based on their data once the math is done the real conclusions of Warren and Tyagi are inescapable and in fact (as Caldwell will be pleased to know) extremely conservative: the financial problems of the middle class are caused by an astonishing rise in the tax burden on middle class families over the past three decades. Nowhere, however, will one read Professor Warren advocating income and property tax cuts as the obvious policy implication of their book–although that is unambiguously the logical inference.” (Emphasis added).
ITALIAN INTEREST RATES movin’ on up. “Italy has had to pay much more to borrow than a month ago as investors continue to worry about its huge debts. Italy had to pay an interest rate of 4.8% to sell 3.5bn euros ($5bn; £3.1bn) of three-year bonds – up 1.1 percentage points from June.” This sort of thing tends to feed on itself.
BILL QUICK EMAILS: “Well, it’s taken a while to get it pulled together, but I finally managed to retrieve the digital rights on my early cyberpunk stuff, and I’ve now got it all reissued as Kindle books at Amazon. I’ll be issuing all my short SF in digital as well, as soon as I can get it converted from dead tree. I’ll price the shorts at 99 cents a pop, and maybe also offer five-story collections at $2.95. I agree with that post you had up a few days ago – I think $2.99 is the sweet spot for reprints, definitely. I might go a buck or two more if I publish a new book in digital only format, just to see how it goes. That 3-tiered price structure is already in place, more or less. Publishers are just fighting over the price points now. The first short I’m going to issue is one I had in Analog back in 1989 called ‘Bank Robbery.’ In it I predicted the web, the collapse of dead tree publishing, and made a pretty good guess as to what would replace it. I just never thought I’d be living that damned story.”
This is as much a scandal for Pelosi and her failed leadership as it is a scandal for Wu. We’re talking about the same proud feminist leadership and the same dysfunctional ethics panel that have dragged their feet on cleaning Capitol Hill’s mountain of other dirty laundry while providing cover to other predatory Dems:
They slapped New York Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel on the wrist for serial tax-cheating.
They have yet to bring California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters to trial after charging her last year with three violations related to her crony TARP bailout intervention on behalf of minority-owned OneUnited Bank in Los Angeles.
They are just now looking into former New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner’s possible abuse of government resources while sending lurid messages and photos to young women across the country.
And they have only recently reauthorized a probe into the aftermath of allegations that former New York Democratic Rep. Eric Massa sexually harassed several young male staffers.
In that case, you’ll recall that Pelosi’s office and Democratic Rep. Barney Frank’s office had both been told by Massa’s top aides of the out-of-control abuse of underlings — but said and did nothing for months.
Wu’s a creep. But the pattern of malign neglect on the part of his Washington enablers is even creepier.
They protect him while he’s an asset, then dump him when he becomes a liability. Not exactly a pattern of neglect.
SHANNON GOESSLING: Ice Age Threat Should Freeze EPA Global Warming Regs. Obviously, Shannon has never read Fallen Angels. Otherwise she’d know that even an actual, as opposed to threatened, ice age would simply be a reason to redouble our efforts against global warming.
NATIONAL MOTORISTS ASSOCIATION: Are Driver’s Licenses Really Necessary? I think they’ve been sufficiently abused — look how many states will take them away from teenagers who get bad grades, and otherwise deny them for reasons having nothing to do with safety — that states shouldn’t be allowed to license drivers. Instead, I think you should simply demonstrate financial responsibility, either via assets or insurance. The problem with this approach is that it offers insufficient leverage to the governing class.
IRA STOLL: Five Facts About The Debt. Including this: “You can fool around with inflation and with the percentage of GDP and with the revenue side of the equation, but the bottom line is that the federal government is spending about double what it was at the end of the Clinton administration. For all the clamor on the left to bring back the Clinton-era top tax rates, there are few, if any, politicians in Washington talking about bringing back the Clinton-era spending levels.”
RAND SIMBERG ON the deanimation of Robert Ettinger. “His body won’t be buried or burned, as most people in his non-metabolizing state are, because those methods of interment would result in a state that even he and they would have recognized as death. Instead, as his bodily functions progressively failed, with a tub of chilled water at bedside, he was declared legally dead so that he could have himself chilled down, his fluids replaced with an anti-freeze solution, ultimately to liquid nitrogen temperatures, to continue a quest on which he had spent most of his life to date: to live indefinitely long. He is not the first to be so preserved, though he is one of only a few hundred in history. But he is the man who made knowledge of the notion widespread to the point that there is a popular mythology of it (no, Walt Disney was not frozen).”
POLITICAL CLASS FAIL: Canton City Council Prez More Upset About Gun Laws Than Irate Cop. “Schulman was recently interviewed by WHLO radio. While he wouldn’t comment on the shocking disregard for the law by officer Harless, what seems to have gotten him really hot and bothered are all of the “out-of-town” emails and phone calls the city has been receiving. Not to mention the crushing inconvenience of the second amendment. . . . The real problem isn’t that Officer Harless conducted himself like a jack-booted thug, violated a motorist’s Constitutional rights and threatened to execute a citizen who was licensed to carry a gun. It’s good to hear, Councilman Schulman, that the people of Canton ‘are being protected.’ The question is, who will protect the people of Canton from policemen like Daniel Harless?”
CATO: Boehner’s New Plan Doesn’t Actually Cut Spending. “The ‘cuts’ in the Boehner plan are only cuts from the CBO baseline, which is an assumed path of constantly rising spending. . . . The way to make real spending cuts is to abolish programs and agencies. But it’s been eight months since a landslide election that focused on the issue of spending cuts, and the Republican leadership hasn’t proposed any major terminations.”
PROGRESS IN GROWING natural replacement teeth: “The significance here isn’t just in the ability to grow teeth. The jaw responded to the teeth by growing supporting bone and nerves. The bone growth wasn’t enough to restore full normal bone support. So there’s still a need to develop methods to control bone growth. But the result suggests the potential to achieve full restoration of both bone and teeth after periodontal disease or trauma. The era of regenerative medicine is drawing near.”
AWOL SERVICEMAN ARRESTED FOR PLANNING FOLLOW-UP ATTACK ON FORT HOOD: “When he was arrested, Abdo was in possession of large quantities of ammunition, weapons and what appeared to be the makings of a bomb, according to early accounts from law enforcement. He had also apparently purchased an Army uniform with Fort Hood patches from a local surplus store. Abdo told ABC News in 2010 he was Muslim and should not have to participate in what he called an ‘unjust war’ in the Middle East.”
An alert gun-store clerk notified authorities. Good thing the ATF didn’t decide to let this one “walk.”
GLOBAL NOT-SO-WARMING? New Data From NASA. “NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.”
President Obama’s been taking a lot of flak lately for not having a plan. First it was about Libya, but now — even more importantly because, as we know, all politics is local (until it’s not) — about the budget.
The latest White House porte-parole Jay Carney has consequently been taking all kinds of in-coming himself about “where’s the President’s budget plan,” “why doesn’t he have a plan,” etc.
Well, the reason for the latter is simple: because he can’t. The minute the president evinces a budget plan, the game is up. No liberal budget will stand up to scrutiny. There is no money left for deficit spending in our aging society. The welfare state is kaput. It’s gone — probably for generations to come.
Of course, there’s always that canard about taxing the rich. That will save things. But the truth is even if you tax the rich at 100%, it barely sets back our entitlement crisis a year or two, while virtually bankrupting the few job creators who remain.
So no wonder Obama doesn’t have a plan. What would it be?
SO WHERE’S YOUR BUDGET THEN, FOLKS? All 53 Senate Dems sign letter to Boehner: Your bill will never pass. “So that’s how this story ends. With the party of endless spending and entitlements unto death lecturing fiscal conservatives on how they’re leading the country into a credit downgrade. Perfecto.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Long-term, universal flu shot on horizon. “A universal flu vaccine that protects against all strains may be within reach in the next five years, replacing annual shots developed for specifics flu viruses, the chief of the National Institutes of Health predicts.”
CHANGE: Michael Barone: Under Obama, Millenials Move Into The GOP Column. “The intended purpose of legislation like the stimulus package and Obamacare was to improve the situations of those least able to take care of themselves — the young, the less educated, the low-skilled. But it is just such groups that, the Pew Research Center numbers show, have been moving away from the president’s party. An instructive achievement, no?”
BANK OF AMERICA HAS SO MANY FORECLOSED HOMES, it’s resorting to bulldozing. And is it just me, or does this sound vaguely Atlas Shrug-ish?
“There is way too much supply,” said Gus Frangos, president of the Cleveland-based Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp., which works with lenders, government officials and homeowners to salvage vacant homes. “The best thing we can do to stabilize the market is to get the garbage off.” . . . The lender will pay as much as $7,500 for demolition or $3,500 in areas eligible to receive funds through the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Uses for the land include development, open space and urban farming, according to the statement. Simon declined to say how many foreclosed properties Bank of America holds.
Urban farming. They had that in Rome in 500 A.D., didn’t they?
JERRY POURNELLE: The Dance Keeps Going On And We Are Being Played. “There is a way out. It starts with cuts in Entitlements. Begin this way: from this moment, you are entitled to only 99% of what you were previously entitled to. That includes Social Security, Welfare, your pension, Medicare. Meanwhile all government salaries and benefits are reduced by 1%. Once again, these are real cuts.”
