Oh, What the Heck, Let's Leave Children Behind and Let's Do It By Executive Fiat

It's no secret that teachers' unions -- the Democratic Party's strongest supporters -- didn't like the No Child Left Behind Act enacted early in the Bush administration.  Why would they want accountability?   That would interfere with what the unions are all about:  higher benefits for union members, and more power for union leaders.  

But this story has larger implications, I think:

State and local education officials have been begging the federal government for relief from student testing mandates in the federal No Child Left Behind law, but school starts soon and Congress still hasn't answered the call.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says he will announce a new waiver system Monday to give schools a break.

The plan to offer waivers to all 50 states, as long as they meet other school reform requirements, comes at the request of President Barack Obama, Duncan said. More details on the waivers will come in September, he said.

Putting aside the continued "dumbing down" of American education, since when is it Constitutional for the Executive Branch to simply decide that duly-enacted laws are going to be "waived"?   Did I miss something in law school where the President can simply announce that certain laws are not going to be enforced?

This is a relatively small story given the current economic meltdown (Dow now down 300+ points), but it's indicative of how a country can slide into tyranny without anyone noticing.

Girl of the Day - Oh, Hell, the Stock Market Is Tanking Again Edition! (Marilyn Monroe)

The stock market predictably is way down to start the day (about 250 points when I last looked).   Predictably -- because futures were down over the weekend, the Nikkei was down last night, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both downgraded this morning (which makes sense, since they are essentially guaranteed by the U.S. government).   So it's hard to fight off the gloom without using serious medicine:

There, that's better.

What Happened to Obama?

There was an essay in the New York Times over the weekend by a professor of psychology named Drew Westen entitled "What Happened to Obama?"   It is almost unreadable as straight commentary because of the cliché liberal mindset of the author (everything is the fault of evil rich people and evil corporations).   But it is remarkable in revealing a turning point in liberal views of the President they elected less than three years ago.   Put simply, the Emperor has no clothes, and the left is suddenly realizing that they have hitched their wagons to a nag:

A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election.

 Put aside the borderline homoerotic aspect of any adult male being "bewitched" by a politican's "eloquence."   And put aside the knee-jerk reference to "an extremist Republican Party" (so extreme it just won 230 seats in the House of Representatives last November).   Look at the terms he's now using about Obama:

• "not up to the task"
• "lack of experience"
• "character defect"
• "accomplished very little"
• "singularly unremarkable career as a law professor"
• "dodging difficult issues"
• "does not know what he believes"
• "willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election"

These are extremely pejorative terms that describe a weak, lost, amoral and selfish man.   And, worse for liberals, these are the exact things that conservatives were saying about Obama before the 2008 election.   How would liberals ever re-energize their devotion to Obama, if this is what they've now come to realize about him?   That conservatives were right all along about him?  

The Viral Power of Grassroots Conservatives

There is a lot of energy out there, very creative energy, dedicated to the proposition that the federal government, as currently constituted, is a pernicious drag on ordinary people.   Using the power of the Internet, grassroots conservatives are able, through the viral nature of how smart ideas spread in our society, to get the word out over the heads of the MSM in ways that never could have happened even ten years ago.   Youtube is one of the greatest leveling inventions ever, and we haven't even begun to tap its influence, I think.   Anyway, here is a video from the Powerline blog's contest that recently awarded prizes for the best way of presenting what the debt crisis means to America.   It's called "Doorbell," and it's everywhere:

August 7, 1942

As an additional antidote to the current gloom, which primarily would manifest itself (at least at first) as a modest decrease in Americans' standard of living (from wildly affluent as a historical matter to only slightly less wildly affluent), it's good to recall that earlier generations had it much, much rougher.   Today is the 69th anniversary of American Marines landing on Guadalcanal.   The fight there would be long and hard, and would cost over 7,000 American lives.

 
In other words, we don't really have it so bad.  Lest we forget. 

Meanwhile, the Pack is Back!

While Rome is burning, as detailed below, it actually makes sense to do some fiddling, if you're just a Regular Guy.   So, on the list of things that continue to be worth living for (the #1 of which is the Regular Wife... Happy Anniversary, sweetheart!), there's always Packers training camp, where kids from Green Bay vie for the honor of having a Packer player ride their bike to the field:

What a neat tradition!   There's no other professional sports team like the small-town Packers.  

A Couple of Spoons of Doom With Your Sunday Morning Coffee

Here's Mark Steyn on NRO this morning, with a healthy dose of gloom and doom on the debt crisis in America:

Like America’s political class, I have also been thinking about America circa 2020. Indeed, I’ve written a book on the subject. My prognosis is not as rosy as the Boehner-Obama deal, as attentive readers might just be able to deduce from the subtle clues in the title: After America: Get Ready For Armageddon. Oh, don’t worry, I’m not one of these “declinists.” I’m way beyond that, and in the express lane to total societal collapse. The fecklessness of Washington is an existential threat not only to the solvency of the republic but to the entire global order. If Ireland goes under, it’s lights out on Galway Bay. When America goes under, it drags the rest of the developed world down with it. When I go around the country saying stuff like this, a lot of folks agree. Somewhere or other, they’ve a vague memory of having seen a newspaper story accompanied by a Congressional Budget Office graph with the line disappearing off the top of the page and running up the wall and into the rafters circa mid-century. So they usually say, “Well, fortunately I won’t live to see it.” And I always reply that, unless you’re a centenarian with priority boarding for the ObamaCare death panel, you will live to see it. Forget about mid-century. We’ve got until mid-decade to turn this thing around.

Otherwise, by 2020 just the interest payments on the debt will be larger than the U.S. military budget. That’s not paying down the debt, but merely staying current on the servicing — like when you get your MasterCard statement and you can’t afford to pay off any of what you borrowed but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge. Except in this case the interest charge for U.S. taxpayers will be greater than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel combined.

When interest payments consume about 20 percent of federal revenues, that means a fifth of your taxes are entirely wasted. Pious celebrities often simper that they’d be willing to pay more in taxes for better government services. But a fifth of what you pay won’t be going to government services at all, unless by “government services” you mean the People’s Liberation Army of China, which will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers by about 2015. When the Visigoths laid siege to Rome in 408, the imperial Senate hastily bought off the barbarian king Alaric with 5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 pounds of silver. But they didn’t budget for Roman taxpayers picking up the tab for the entire Visigoth military as a permanent feature of life.

The only silver lining?   It's worse in Europe, as this article from the London Telegraph details:

There have been warnings that we may be in for a repeat of the calamitous events of 2008. The truth, however, is that the situation is potentially much bleaker even than in those desperate days after the closure of Lehman Brothers. Back then, policy-makers had at their disposal a whole range of powerful tools to remedy the situation which are simply not available today.

First of all, the 2008 crisis struck at the ideal stage of an economic cycle. Interest rates were comparatively high, both in Europe and the United States. This meant that central banks were in a position to avert disaster by slashing the cost of borrowing. Today, rates are still at rock bottom, so that option is no longer available.

Second, the global situation was far more advantageous three years ago. One key reason why Western economies appeared to recover so fast was that China responded with a substantial economic boost. Today, China, plagued by high inflation as a result of this timely intervention, is in no position to stretch out a helping hand.

But it is the final difference that is the most alarming. Back in 2008, national balance sheets were in reasonable shape. In Britain, for example, state debt (according to the official figures, which were, admittedly, highly suspect) stood at around 40 per cent of GDP. This meant that we had the balance sheet strength to step into the markets and bail out failed banks. Partly as a result, national debt has now surged past the 60 per cent mark, meaning that it is impossible for the British government to perform the same rescue operation without risking bankruptcy. Many other Western democracies face the same problem.

The consequence is terrifying. Policy-makers find themselves in the position of a driver heading down the outside lane of a motorway who suddenly finds that none of his controls are working: no accelerator, no brakes and a faulty steering wheel. Experience, skill and a prodigious amount of luck are required if a grave accident is to be averted. Unfortunately, it is painfully apparent that none of these qualities are available: Western leaders are out of their depth.

The only problem is:  Europe's problems are America's problems in a global economy.   And vice versa.  

So have yourself a cheery day!  It's raining cats and dogs in Milwaukee.  

Girl of the Day - Vera Farmiga

I really liked her in The Departed and Up in the Air.   Not super beautiful, but cute and smart.  Sort of like a poor man's Annette Bening.   Anyway, yesterday was Vera Farmiga's birthday (38).  

America Downgraded

The S&P downgraded U.S. treasury debt late Friday from AAA to AA+.   Its rationale cuts to the heart of the problem, namely, that our governing class has become dysfunctional, and unable to deal with the problem of our national debt on anything near the scale necessary:

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy. Despite this year's wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently. Republicans and Democrats have only been able to agree to relatively modest savings on discretionary spending while delegating to the Select Committee decisions on more comprehensive measures. It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options. In addition, the plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.

Our opinion is that elected officials remain wary of tackling the structural issues required to effectively address the rising U.S. public debt burden in a manner consistent with a 'AAA' rating.

Scary.   And unnecessary.   We could have done so much better for ourselves.

***

A lot of people have noticed over the years how really really bad news tends to get dropped late Friday so that people don't notice over the weekend.   Not sure whether the S&P's downgrade was manipulated in this way, or whether it was just smart to do it so the markets could digest it before Monday.   Either way, come Monday it will be interesting to see what will happen.  

This is unprecedented for the United States.   Just another thing that Obama can claim for his "unprecedented" Presidency.  

August 6, 1945

I like to think of myself as a student of World War II history.   It is a fascination of mine, particularly the experiences of infantry soldiers, in part because my generation (men who came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s) were completely spared any combat of our own.   Today, of course, is the 66th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in Japan that was the beginning of the end of the war.   Knowing what I know from reading -- and sensitive to what I most certainly do not know from experience, namely, what Paul Fussell* called "having to come to grips, face to face, with an enemy who designs your death," i.e., the experience of combat by front-line infantry troops -- I have no compunction in saying that the bombing of Hiroshima with a small nuclear weapon was completely justified.   Japan's Army of some two million men was still intact, and the beaches of Kyushu and Honshu, the main Japanese islands, were heavily fortified.   The Japanese population was committed to dying for their Emperor in a sort of mass kamikaze suicide.   The casualties that would have occurred, not just on the American and British side, but on the Japanese side too, would have dwarfed the hundreds of thousands killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the terror and horror and inhumanity of non-nuclear combat in modern warfare is certainly not ontologically different, and may even be worse than the instantaneous obliteration of those cities, however horrible it may have been.   Read about Stalingrad one time if you want to see what man can do to man, even without atomic bombs.  

Perhaps the best comment on the decision by Truman to drop the bomb came from Winston Churchill:

There were those who considered that the atomic bomb should never have been used at all. I cannot associate myself with such ideas… I am surprised that very worthy people—but people who in most cases had no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves—should adopt a position that rather than throw this bomb we should have sacrificed a million American and a quarter of a million British lives…

* In a great essay called "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," which can be found here.

Girl of the Day - Marion Cotillard

I've seen the French actress Marion Cotillard in several movies now, including Inception, Public Enemies, and the somewhat disappointing Woody Allen film, Midnight in Paris.  I haven't seen her starring role as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, for which she won the Academy Award, but I imagine I'd like it, as I generally like historical biography movies, particularly set in the 1930s and 1940s.   So I guess it's time she's Girl of the Day:

Also, and I hope without offending anyone, there's this funny short film shedid, which makes me think that she has a cool sense of humor:  

Why?

Milwaukee, where I live, has had two incidents in the past month of mobs of young black people beating up random white people.   The first occurred on the Fourth of July after the lakefront fireworks:

Shaina Perry remembers the punch to her face, blood streaming from a cut over her eye, her backpack with her asthma inhaler, debit card and cellphone stolen, and then the laughter.

"They just said 'Oh, white girl bleeds a lot,' " said Perry, 22, who was attacked at Kilbourn Reservoir Park over the Fourth of July weekend.

Though Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn noted Tuesday that crime is colorblind, he called the Sunday night looting of a convenience store near the park and beatings of a group of people who had gone to the park disturbing, outrageous and barbaric.

Police would not go quite as far as others in connecting the events; Flynn said several youths "might" be involved in both.

"We're not going to let any group of individuals terrorize or bully any of our neighborhoods," Flynn said.

Perry was among several who were injured by a mob they said beat and robbed them and threw full beer bottles while making racial taunts. The injured people were white; the attackers were African-American, witnesses said.

The second occurred just last night, at the Wisconsin State Fair:

Witnesses told WTMJ-AM (620) that dozens to hundreds of young black people were beating white people as they left the fair late Thursday night. Patrice Harris, a spokeswoman for the fair, said a police alert she was given indicated four people were hurt.

"It looked like they were just going after white guys, white people," Norb Roffers of Wind Lake told WTMJ. He said he left the State Fair entrance near the corner of S. 84th St. and W. Schlinger Ave. in West Allis.

One eyewitness, a concession worker who works near the midway area, told the Journal Sentinel that large groups of African-American youths ran through the midway area, knocking over young children and adults, disrupting midway rides and tearing signs up.

"I have never seen anything like it," the worker said. "It was mob mentality."

Now, I'm not interested in the double-standard question that many will ask:  what if white kids did this to black people?   Wouldn't it be a huge story?  Blah, blah, blah.   But, of course it would, and rightly so, because, lest we forget, we do have a history in America of lynch mobs, and, while these new incidents are vile, no one has gotten killed.   Yet, anyway.

No, what I want to ask is.... why?   Why are black kids doing this?  

I would like to chalk this up to summer heat; or youth; or the prevalence of cell-phones as a way of communicating with large groups of people and organizing them into flash mobs; or boredom; or lack of parental supervision or involvement; or the lack of summer jobs; or poverty.   But lots of white kids are poor; lots of Hispanic kids don't have summer jobs; lots of kids of all stripes come from divorced or single-mother homes where there aren't fathers around; most kids don't have summer jobs; all kids have cell phones nowadays; and all of them are hot and bored in the summer.   But I don't hear about white kids in mobs beating up black people; or Hispanics; or Hmongs; or any other  group.  

So what is it about black kids that is making them join mobs to beat white random people? 

As sorry as I am to say this, I think it's in the nature of what we've been taught for the past sixty years or so.   We've been taught as a culture that racism against blacks is wrong; we've been taught our history of slavery and Jim Crow and segregation; we've been taught about MLK, etc.   Because of that, racism to most of us has become taboo, and rightly so.  But that teaching, while a good thing, has had an awful side effect.   While the rest of the culture has grown increasingly uncomfortable with racism, the black community* appears to have become more and more comfortable with reverse racism.   They've been taught so long in their homes and schools and churches (Rev. Wright, anyone?) that they and they alone are the victims of white racism that they've come to accept as a matter of course a mirror image of the very racism that they supposedly opposed.   They think of white people as the "Other" nowadays a lot more than white people think of black people as the "Other."  And when you dehumanize people by thinking of them as fundamentally different than you, you can do anything to them. 

I wish I were wrong but I don't think I am.  



* At least a small part of it.   The tragedy of incidents like this is, of course, that the huge number of good black kids (and I've met a lot of them coaching Little League) who are friends with kids of all races and who wouldn't do something like the wilding incidents described here in a million years can get tarred as hooligans because of the actions of the few.   I grieve for our friends and teammates Khalil and Tevin and Jaron who now, when they go to a place like State Fair, will get evil eyes from people who, if they just knew them and talked to them, would realize what beautiful kids they are. 

Girl of the Day - Politics, Schmolitics, I Need Some Natalie Wood!

Enough political and economic gloom and doom.   Let's have some Splendor in the Grass:

Yesterday, I noted that Eleanor Parker, though she had three Academy Award nominations for Best Actress (no wins), really doesn't register as a huge movie star fifty years later.   On the other hand, Natalie Wood, with two nominations (and also no wins), still does.   Why?  

Two reasons, I think:  one, she was in at least two truly "classic" movies, a small role in John Wayne's greatest movie The Searchers, and then as Maria (although not singing, that was the inevitable Marnie Nixon) in West Side Story.   Parker never had roles in movies that have lived on, and will continue to live on like those movies.  

Second, and most obviously, she was just exceptionally great looking.   Not sure anyone in Hollywood has ever come close.* 

***

By the way, I had known that Marnie Nixon dubbed Maria (Wood) in West Side Story, and Liza (Audrey Hepburn) in My Fair Lady, but I hadn't known that she also did Anna (Deborah Kerr) in The King and I.   Amazing!   Probably the greatest three female roles in movie musicals ever.   

  *A third reason would probably also be her tragic and somewhat mysterious drowning death.

"Powerless" Redux - A New Meme?

Yesterday I noted that Politico had referred to President Obama as "powerless" to impact the economy.   Today I note an article from The Hill, also from yesterday, that had this line as its lede:

Democrats are bracing for the jobs report due Friday morning from the Labor Department, knowing their political futures rest on the economy over which they have little control.

My initial reaction was to take these comments literally as the ideological concessions that they appear to be:  if a liberal Democratic President and his liberal Democratic compatriots in Congress are "powerless" and "have little control" over the economy, then what bilge have they been selling us for eighty years about managing the economy?   Has the massive bureaucracy of regulation and intervention built up over the past four freakin' generations really only been a jobs program for government bureaucrats?

Well, in a word, yes.  

***

On the other hand, there was  also this strange comment from Jay Carney, the President's press spokesman, again yesterday, saying that the White House doesn't create jobs:

“The White House doesn’t create jobs,” Carney said, adding “the government, together — White House, Congress — creates policies that allow for greater job creation.”

I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but it sure seems to me that the Left is advancing a new meme in concert that Obama can't really do anything about jobs.   Call it a trial balloon before the 2012 race, where they know he will get hammered on a four-year record on employment that is so terrible.

CNN Loves the Jobs Report... or Why the MSM Is Stupid

When smart people can go directly to the BLS for the primary data, the "news" industry has no product to sell except unintentional comedy.   Here's a screen shot from CNN's website this morning:

You have to squint, but there's a hilarious line on the left:  "Businesses were busy hiring, but those gains were tempered by a loss of government jobs."

Boo-hoo, the tax leaches are losing jobs, while the tax payers are gaining jobs.   Cry me a river.

9.1% -- What Does The Number Really Mean?

The unemployment data for July is out.   The unemployment rate was down slightly, from 9.2% to 9.1%.   So what does the number really mean?


I'll tell you what it doesn't mean.   It doesn't mean that we're suddenly moving back in the right direction on jobs.   The key sentence in the Bureau of Labor Statistics release this morning is this one:  "The civilian labor force participation rate edged down in July to 63.9 percent."   According to the actual BLS data, the civilian labor force was actually down 193,000 people and the number of employed was actually down 38,000.   There were 156,000 fewer unemployed because fewer people were counted as part of the labor force to begin with.  


In other words, we could get unemployment down to 0% if everyone just stopped working and started, oh, hunting and gathering for food.


***


Meanwhile, it's worth recalling the famous chart produced by the Obama administration to support the stimulus way back in the spring of 2009, where they predicted that, with the stimulus, unemployment would never get above 8% and by now would be around 6.6%.   The reality has worked in the opposite direction from the prediction of the government geniuses in Washington:

This chart still makes me laugh.   Or cry.   Hard to tell what to do these days.


***

Oh, by the way, the BLS release also says that the U.S. "added" 117,000 new jobs in July.   The problem is that, with population growth, we need to add roughly 200-250,000 new jobs just to break even every month.   The only reason the unemployment rate isn't going up with job growth so anemic, is because the size of the labor force is actually shrinking!   Over the past year the size of the labor force has actually (and historically, this is an anomaly) shrunk by roughly 400,000 workers, from 153.6 million to 153.2 million.   But here's the key figure:  the number of "non-institutionalized" people who are not in the labor force over the same period grew from 84.2 million to 86.4 million, an increase of 2.2 million.   People who give up aren't counted as unemployed, but they might as well be.  


In short, there's not much silver lining in today's jobs news.  

Roger Kimball Nails It

Here's Roger Kimball writing about Obama today, after the stock market meltdown:

But of course the big news today was a number: 512 — the number of points the Dow lost. Some one with a calculator can tell us how many billions of dollars that represents. You don’t need a calculator to know what it means about the people we’ve elected to lead us, above all about Barack Obama, the smooth-talking neophyte who thinks economics is about redistributing wealth instead of (what it is really about) creating wealth.

The American poet Frank O’Hara wrote a poem whose title I’ve always admired: “Meditations in an Emergency.” That’s where we are now: you can tell it’s an emergency by the panic you smell in the air. It will get worse. And as it does more and more people will recognize an important fact: that Barack Obama is presiding over a Potemkin Village. He hasn’t a clue about what to do to salvage the U.S economy. How could he? He was brought up on the anti-growth, statist nostrums that forsake basic human psychology for the sake of utopian schemes...

Barack Obama . . . It was a good show while it lasted. If you closed your eyes and said “spread the wealth” he might have seemed, for a moment, like a serious politician. Really, as everyone sees now, he is a Gatsby-like figure who smiles and smiles but is imploding before our eyes.

On a summer-stock stage, it might have been an illuminating melodrama. Alas, we threw caution to the winds and elected someone who resented this country, was suspicious of wealth, and whose reflexive commitment to left-wing nostrums would gravely damage the most productive economy the world has ever seen. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people will suffer because of our naïveté and Barack Obama’s malevolent stupidity.

As I noted earlier today, I don't hear anyone defending Obama anymore.   It's like they're all embarrassed at what they've done.  Unfortunately, we're all going to pay the price for another eighteen months.   I only hope that America will still be salvageable by January 2013.

512

Just an update.  The stock market ended up dropping 512 points, the biggest one day loss since 2008.   Double dip anyone?   The jobs numbers for July come out tomorrow.   I'm glad I still have one.

Our "Powerless" President

Ace, in a great piece on Obama's prospects for 2012, quotes a Politico article, from which this line jumped out at me:

No one assumes employment, growth or housing prices to pick up much, if at all — something Obama is essentially powerless to change.

Is the Left really going to argue that Presidents are "powerless" to change the course of the economy?   Really?   After nearly eighty years of Keynesian intervention as the modus operandi of the Democratic Party?

Besides, there's lots Obama could do to change employment, growth and housing prices.   He could repeal Obamacare, he could rein in his regulators, he could make the Bush tax cuts permanent, he could make a serious effort to reform entitlements as a way of cutting the deficit going forward, etc., etc.  
He won't do any of this, but that doesn't mean that he's "powerless" to do so.  

What he's "powerless" to do is to make false things true... he's "powerless" to make government-run health care, hyper-regulation, higher taxes, and runaway entitlements a successful way to spur a modern economy.   Obama's an awfully Orwellian figure -- our most "black is white" and "war is peace" President ever -- but he can't really make black white, or war peace, and he can't make left-wing economics work.  

On the other hand, he is "powerless" to affect the economy in at least one respect:  he simply lacks the understanding of how the economy works to know what to do.  

Obama as Failure

The meme is multiplying.  I mentioned last week Peggy Noonan's piece on Obama as a "loser."   Here are two new instances.   First, Roger Simon makes a good point about Obama, using the analogy that he's America's CEO:

The worldwide market plunge since the signing of the U.S. debt agreement tells us one thing above all: Almost no one on the planet has confidence in the leadership of Barack Obama.

A CEO with such a disastrous first three years as our president has had probably would already have been called upon to resign or been pushed out by his company’s board of directors — more than likely for some time.

Next, an anonymous wag at Ace of Spades makes an even better point (since noticing what isn't there is harder  intellectually than drawing analogies from what is there):

Had a chat with a friend yesterday who asked an odd question. He wanted to know if I knew anybody who didn't support Obama in 2008 but who does support him for 2012.

Well, I don't. But he wanted me to go public with the question. And I think it's a good question.

Do You Know Anybody Who Voted Against Obama in 2008 But Has Been Converted and Will Vote For Him in 2012?

A really strong, common sense measure of where Obama's at right now is whether you've heard anyone in the halls of a big company defending the guy.   I work in a big law firm where I'd venture to say that more than 50% of the lawyers are Democrats.   No one is defending Obama out loud anymore.   No one.  

And then there are the cartoons:

"Pricing In" the Accelerating Doom

UPDATE:  250 points was hopeful a couple of hours ago.   We're now in range of having a really bad day.  Dow is down 470 points.

***

The efficient markets hypothesis holds that the stock market "prices in" all available information about the economy, even though no individual can possibly know all available information... the market, in other words, is smarter than any individual.   (Hear that, Mr. President?)

Well, the market for the past two weeks has apparently been "pricing in" the fact that the debt ceiling deal would largely be a joke, that the governing class is dysfunctional, and that we still have Obama for another eighteen months.   Today the markets are tanking again, down 250 plus points when I last looked.   I think they are "pricing in" tomorrow's jobs report for July, which promises to be horrible.  

In other words, strap yourselves in.   We've gone over the top of the roller coaster and gravity is taking over.   And gravity, as my dad would say, "if you had taken Physics," is a form of acceleration.

Girl of the Day - Eleanor Parker

Eleanor Parker is one of those Hollywood stars who never starred in a true "classic" movie, and so has passed a bit into the void of historical amnesia, but who, in her prime, was a terrific actress who fought for and got great parts in serious movies.   It seems amazing to me that someone who probably is often confused with the musical star and tap-dancer, Eleanor Powell, was nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Actress in the early 1950s (what was arguably the peak of American cinema):  in Caged, Detective Story, and Interrupted Melody.   The only one I've seen is Detective Story, and it was a very fine, albeit stagey film noir with Kirk Douglas.    I suspect most people haven't seen any of them, which is a bit sad.  As always, tempus fugit.   She's 89 and, I hope, still doing well.

Well, That Didn't Take Long

In the aftermath of lifting the debt ceiling, the federal government's debt in just a scant few days has gone past 100% of our GDP:

US debt shot up $238 billion to reach 100 percent of gross domestic project after the government's debt ceiling was lifted, Treasury figures showed Wednesday.

Treasury borrowing jumped Tuesday, the data showed, immediately after President Barack Obama signed into law an increase in the debt ceiling as the country's spending commitments reached a breaking point and it threatened to default on its debt.

The new borrowing took total public debt to $14.58 trillion, over end-2010 GDP of $14.53 trillion, and putting it in a league with highly indebted countries like Italy and Belgium.

At the end of the story, there's this little nugget:

Moody's said Tuesday that the government needed to stabilize the ratio at 73 percent by 2015 "to ensure that the long-run fiscal trajectory remains compatible with a AAA rating.

Hmmmm.... to get to a debt to GDP ratio of 73% by 2015 we'd have to borrow $0 (balance the budget, in other words) and grow the economy by 27% in 4 years.   I did the math:  with compounding you'd have to have annualized growth of 6.2% in 2012-2015, i.e., with Obamacare and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts kicking in.   Not going to happen.   Then, when the inevitable downgrade occurs, interest rates will soar, putting a further cramp in business borrowing, new home construction, home sales, home improvements, etc. 

I don't need no Mark Steyn to feel the gloom.  

God's Blog

Sacrilegious, but funny, at the New Yorker.   My favorite, from the comments on creation:

The lemon tree: very pretty. The lemon flower: sweet. But the fruit of the poor lemon? Impossible to eat. Is this a bug or a feature?

Girl of the Day - Continuing the Extra Hot Summer Theme! (Dorothy McGuire)

In 1958 and 1959 there were a slew of movies with "summer" in the title.   There was The Long, Hot Summer (1958) with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; A Summer Place (1959) with Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire and Sandra Dee; and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) with Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift.  What was going on?   I was born in 1959, so I have a two-word theory about what was going on.   Air conditioning.   According to statistics from HUD, fewer than half of American households had air conditioning as late as 1973, and less than 20% had central air.   Haven't been able to locate stats, but fourteen years earlier I suspect that the number of households with central air, or any air conditioning at all, was probably much, much lower.   So people were thinking about summer heat all the time.  

We take a lot for granted these days about how easy our lives have become.

Anyway, here's a nice shot of Dorothy McGuire, who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, the home of the Regular Wife.

Birthday Today - Peter O'Toole

Peter O'Toole turns 79 today.   Is there a better or more irreplaceable film performance than O'Toole in his role as Lawrence of Arabia?   I doubt it.   Maybe Brando in On the Waterfront.   Maybe Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.   But I doubt there's been a better scene than this one:

"Reactionary Nihilists"

An apt description of contemporary liberals by Victor Davis Hanson:

A common charge is that the tea party was terrorist-like in its willingness to bring the fiscal system to a halt to enforce some sort of limits on new debt. I say ‘common’ since the vice president of the United States purportedly put his own brand on that slur. But tea-party efforts to control the spending were belated and reactive; the real nihilism comes from those who apparently wanted no limits on the debt they might run up and had no plan to pay it back. In one formula, we are borrowing  $4 billion a day and have run up nearly $5 trillion in the first three years of this administration. To define questioning a debt of $16 trillion as heartless cutting is unhinged. The country is now in a surreal cycle of borrowing gargantuan amounts of money, and then almost automatically going ballistic should anyone suggest that we trim any of the new borrowing. Every new dollar borrowed instinctively becomes ossified and sacrosanct; as the hysteria arises not over the old baseline figures, but trimming the proposed rate of new borrowing. At what point would Obama and his team, if unchallenged, have stopped borrowing on their own? And at what point would they be happy with increasing taxes? If some in a New York or California are currently paying 45–50 percent in local, state, and federal income taxes, aside from payroll taxes, should they pay 60 percent or 70 percent — or should 5 percent of households begin to pay 70, 80, or 90 percent of the aggregate tax burden? And of course, these are just the fiscal sides of the argument; lost entirely in the focus over money is whether the new trillions are needed and well spent. Few these days even ask whether $3.6 trillion in its entirety is critical — whether the federal largess  improves American life, has no effect, or makes things worse. The massive borrowers are the real anarchists who apparently want to print money to the point that it is rendered of little value, or so gorge the government beast that vast new redistributive taxes will be necessary — an apparently good end, in and of itself, or create incentives and punishments through new formulas of federal spending and taxes that vastly alter the conduct of present-day American life. Reactionary nihilism best describes any who want to take the old welfare state of the 1960s and expand it to the point of implosion.

Girl of the Day - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Version (Elizabeth Taylor)

It's been a hot time in late July and early August this summer all over, but we here in the upper Midwest aren't as used to it as some of the rest of you.   So it's hard to sleep, and sweaty, and sticky... you know what I'm talking about.   Makes you feel like a cat on a hot tin roof:

Forty Years Ago Today - Concert for Bangladesh

Forty years ago, on August 1, 1971, George Harrison organized the Concert for Bangladesh, which was the model for all of the subsequent left-liberal rock concerts for charity.   I generally have found these types of concerts to be self-congratulatory exercises in futility -- starvation in the Third World is caused usually by politics, not by drought or famine.   Bangladesh was no different.... But, back in the day, the music was great.   Here's Bob Dylan:

The Debt Ceiling Deal as Propaganda

Here's my problem with the debt ceiling "deal."   Let's assume that the "cuts" of some $900 billion over the next ten years that are identified in the deal are real cuts.   I don't think they are; I'm confident that Senators and Congressmen will use accounting gimmicks to get the numbers they want and can sell; but let's assume it anyway.   And let's assume that the prospective cuts of $1.5 trillion over the next ten years that the "Super-Committee" of Senators and Congressmen are supposed to come up with by Christmas will be real cuts too.   Again, I don't think they will be, but let's play along.

Okay, then, so we have $2.4 trillion or so of cuts over the next ten years.   But the CBO's projected spending for the years 2012-2021 is... wait for it.... $46 trillion.   (Here's the CBO report to prove it... go to page 72 and weep.)   That means that we've managed to cut a whopping 2% out of our projected spending in the immediate cuts, and a total of a projected 5% if the Super-Committee actually does what it says it's going to do.  

Does anyone have any belief that the CBO's projections of federal government spending over ten years are even accurate to within 5%?   To within 2%?  I don't think they're accurate to within 10% or, likely, even 20%.   

So we're enacting "cuts" and congratulating ourselves on our fiscal responsibility, when what we propose to cut is within the margin of error of our estimates.

In other words, if what you're cutting is a rounding error, you haven't really cut anything.  

They're telling us a nice story to keep us from buying guns and canned goods and preparing for Armageddon.   I guess as a Burkean conservative I'm all in favor of telling the nice story, because Armageddon is so distasteful, but it's hard not to notice in your heart of hearts that it's just a story, and that we're being played.