Somethings Wrong With John

Michael Savage: Don't punish brave Marines

2012-01-20T07:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/story/2012-01-19/Michael-Savage-Marines-Taliban/52685194/1

Ball so hard

2012-01-05T12:11:00.001-08:00

front lines: The Year We Lost Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey,...

2012-01-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

front lines: The Year We Lost Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey,...: Sultan Knish - About the only people having a Happy New Year in the Muslim world aren't the Christians who are huddling and waiting out the...

In Obama he trusts - Washington Times

2011-12-29T12:54:00.000-08:00

There’s something profoundly tragic about the failed presidency of Barack Obama. He was supposed to be a new kind of president, a man who embodied hope and would transcend petty politics and even race. Instead, we’re left with a downgraded America that is stagnating under the weight of its bloated government. As tragic as that alone is, even this is but a mere symptom of Mr. Obama’s larger fundamental failure: He simply does not trust the Americans who entrusted him with the presidency.

Most presidents, we believe, ascend to the Oval Office, but for the 44th president, the reverse seems true. Whatever majesty the White House can muster must rise to the grandiosity of Barack Obama. “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” said the man who writes autobiographies and later would claim to control the rise of the oceans.

As recently as this month, the food-stamp president of 13 million unemployed Americans declared himself the fourth-most-accomplished president in the history of the United States, eclipsing, in his own mind, President Reagan and even our nation’s father, George Washington. That in only three years. Barack the Magnificent won’t allow trivialities like $15 trillion debts or historic national credit downgrades dissuade him.

Mr. Obama may care deeply for America, but he believes in only one thing: Barack Obama. And you are not Barack Obama.

Where once the American flag was hailed universally as the ultimate symbol of freedom, we who live under it have slowly but surely surrendered our liberties to an insatiable government. Consider our decline in just the past two generations. Our grandfathers, who stood against evil and shed their blood to stop it, never would have tolerated their own government becoming so totalitarian that it would dictate to them what car they should drive, what (if any) health insurance they should choose or even what light bulb they should buy.

Has our generation been worthy of earlier Americans’ sacrifices? Or have we surrendered their hard-fought victories in return for false promises of a big-government utopia that never materializes? Look no further than the politicians we elect. We have chosen as our president a man who believes we are unworthy, not of the previous generations’ sacrifices, but rather unworthy of freedom itself.

The sum total of Mr. Obama’s political philosophy, the unifying theme of his presidency, amounts to this: You cannot be trusted to live as a free American.

President Obama’s first major legislative action, the failed $787 stimulus, revealed his fundamental distrust of free Americans. A president who actually trusts his people would stand aside as they freely chose how to invest their capital and their labor. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, simply doesn’t believe you are smart enough to know what’s best for you. He commandeered nearly $1 trillion dollars from the taxpayers and redirected it as he saw fit. That he squandered billions on crony boondoggles such as the Solyndra solar-panel company or laughable efforts to measure the malt-liquor habits of Buffalonians and the like is evidence merely of his incompetence. That he trusted only himself to allocate taxpayers’ money in the first place - even if he had had the capacity to do so brilliantly - is evidence of a much larger offense: This president distrusts his subjects.

Obamacare is a modern-day monument to government arrogance. So untrustworthy are Americans that they cannot be allowed to decide for themselves whether to purchase health insurance or, if so, how much. Likewise, physicians are too untrustworthy to provide you with care without first consulting the government’s “best practices” guidelines. Obamacare would solve both.

Untrustworthy bankers would become angelic under the restrictions of Dodd-Frank. Untrustworthy bloggers would fall in line under the Stop Online Piracy Act. Untrustworthy manufacturers would create the only jobs worth having under the dictates of the National Labor Relations Board. And untrustworthy energy consumers would act responsibly only under the restrictions of “cap and trade” or at least a dictatorial Environmental Protection Agency.

For statists like Mr. Obama, no matter how bloated our government has become, America is forever just one legislative act away from utopia, if only those untrustworthy Americans would just get in line. The man who ran on hope has instead embraced a tragic pessimism that views all free Americans with disdain as either incompetent rubes in need of his salvation or unrighteous villains in need of his rules. Either way, Mr. Obama embraces a command-and-control government and rejects American freedom.

Mr. Obama’s distrust of Americans is his fatal flaw, and Republicans would be wise to exploit it fully. The GOP should resist the temptation simply to become a cleverer version of autocrats who pull the same powerful levers of government but in different directions. Instead, they should become the party that embraces liberty.

If the 2012 election is between Republicans and Democrats or even between conservatives and liberals, Republicans might win. But if the election is instead between a bloated, ineffectual government that distrusts its subjects and Americans who still yearn to breathe free, Republicans will win. Only then will voters have a dramatic choice between a party that trusts Americans to be free and a party that does not.

Dr. Milton R. Wolf, a Washington Times columnist, is a radiologist and President Obama’s cousin. He blogs at miltonwolf.com.

The dirty secret in Uncle Sam’s Friday trash dump

2011-12-29T08:51:00.000-08:00

Releasing information on the Friday before a big holiday is a time-tested way to bury bad news. So when the Government Accountability Office’s fiscal 2011 financial statements for the federal government were released on the Friday before Christmas, it made sense to read them closely.

Since 1997, the United States has been a rare example of a government willing to publish financial statements using accrual accounting, which counts the cost of promises made as well as cash paid out. And the GAO’s professionalism over the years has won it a reputation for impartiality and effectiveness.

That professionalism is evident in the GAO analysis of the net present value of the Social Security and Medicare promises Washington has made to Americans. “Net present value” means the total that would have to be set aside today to pay the costs of these programs in the future. The government puts these numbers in appendices, rather than in headlines. But the costs are real.

In fiscal 2011, the cost of the promises grew from $30.9 trillion to $33.8 trillion. To put that in context, consider that the total value of companies traded on U.S. stock markets is $13.1 trillion, based on the Wilshire 5000 index, and the value of the equity in U.S. taxpayers’ homes, according to Freddie Mac, is $6.2 trillion. Said another way, there is not enough wealth in America to meet those promises.

If the government followed corporate accounting rules, that $2.9 trillion increase would be added to the $1.3 trillion cash deficit for fiscal 2011 that has been widely reported. And a $4.2 trillion deficit is something that Americans need to know about.

The Treasury acknowledges the need to show an accrual-based deficit, but the only retirement accruals it includes in its “Citizen’s Guide” to the GAO numbers are for promises to direct government employees and veterans. Promises to the rest of Americans are excluded, even though they are multiples larger than the $10.2 trillion of government debt held by the public.

The latest GAO numbers are particularly interesting because of a change in accounting standards that requires the government to explain why the cost grew by $2.9 trillion. Fully $1.5 trillion of that reflects the aging of all 312 million Americans by one year. In the GAO report from fiscal 2001, the cost of promises was $17 trillion. The growth in the cost from $17 trillion to $33.8 trillion averages about $1.7 trillion per year. The GAO doesn’t specify numbers for the other nine years, but one suspects that aging has driven most of the growth in the cost of the promises.

The cost would have been a lot worse but for two assumptions that the GAO found questionable.

First, Medicare’s cost projections assume legally required decreases in reimbursement rates to doctors that Congress has ignored for years — the so-called doc fix. For these projections to be realized, Congress would have to abide by its own cost controls and allow an immediate 27 percent cut to doctors’ rates, which is very unlikely.

Second, the Medicare projections assume that the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) will reduce health-care cost growth by 1.1 percent per year, despite doubts voiced by the GAO and a panel appointed by the Medicare board of trustees.

The panel and the GAO recommended including an alternate scenario in the year-end figures, in which the doc fix continues and the ACA cost reductions do not materialize. The result is a $12.4 trillion increase in the cost of the promises, to more than $46 trillion. Given Congress’s history with the doc fix, and the general paralysis in Washington, it’s hard to argue with the GAO’s lack of confidence in Congress’s ability to honor its own cost controls.

If the government were a company, its huge and growing off-balance-sheet liabilities would set off alarm bells. But investor confidence has not been lost — Treasurys can still be sold at very attractive yields.

Confidence has been shaken, though, among the American people. Congress’s approval ratings are at record lows. Anger is flaring across the political spectrum, reflecting a sense that something has broken in our country.

In such an environment, is it right to release critical financial information the Friday before Christmas? Is it acceptable that politicians are not required to describe the cost of the promises they have made?

In 1990, the government required that companies begin to account for the net present value of retirement promises, not just current-year cash flows. General Motors began complying in 1992; and it recorded a $33.1 billion (pretax) charge to reflect the value of its promises up to that point, which led to what was then the largest annual loss in U.S. corporate history. Seventeen years later, the “free until accounted for” promises were a major factor in GM’s bankruptcy.

The United States is stronger than General Motors. And the good news is that small changes in health-care cost trends have a large impact on the government’s long-term promises. Our system is fixable. But our politics are toxic, and each side is dug into an ideological trench. In such an environment, when hard choices need to be made about promises and taxes, why should information be buried in an appendix?

Americans deserve better. One way for Washington to start earning back our trust is by giving us all the information, even if it is unpleasant.

Nine Signs of a Covert War Between the U.S. and Iran

2011-12-21T09:59:00.000-08:00

Nine Signs of a Covert War Between the U.S. and Iran

Where No Mortgage News Is Fit to Print

2011-12-21T07:18:00.001-08:00

The New York Times op-ed page and the left-wing echo chamber.

When Joe Nocera was given a regular op-ed column in the New York Times, there was kind of a collective “uh-oh” among people who have watched the gradual slide of that page into Krugmanism and ideological irrelevance. I was one of them, but thought there might be some hope. Some of his columns in the Times business section had suggested a glimmering of a willingness to consider other points of view and even facts.

At first, I was disappointed. As he said in today’s column, he called my dissent from the majority report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission “lonely” and “loony.” That was fairly nasty, but I have been called much worse by the hard Left. We had a few more skirmishes, and then he made a truly serious error, blindly following his lefty views in calling the Tea Party “terrorists.” At that point, I wrote him:

Joe: Weren’t you one of the ones on the left who blamed Gabby Giffords’ shooting on right-wing rhetoric? As the victim of some very vicious and threatening e-mails from the left, I find it somewhat peculiar that you and your colleagues would be stirring up the dogs of war by calling your opposition terrorists at war on America. This sounds a bit hypocritical (or worse) to me. Wouldn’t it be better for someone in your position—writing for a newspaper that (given your recent attack on the WSJ) must stand for sober non-ideological discussion—to call for civility, rather than stirring up hatred? Would I be wrong to consider you no better than those who send me equally unbalanced e-mail? Peter

His response, I agreed, would be confidential; but a little while later, he publicly retracted the charge, and I wrote him again to note the praise he then received from the New York Times ombudsman.

I thought, at this point, that he would avoid following his colleague Paul Krugman over the ideological cliff. It was Krugman who famously wrote—when Fannie and Freddie were coming apart—that all the right-wing talk about those two firms acquiring subprime loans were lies. They weren’t even allowed by law to do so, said Krugman, once again following ideas he’d heard in the left-wing echo-chamber rather than doing even the most basic research into the facts. Krugman has disgraced himself as a scholar, but I still had some hope for Nocera.

During the past summer, I pointed out to him that another of his colleagues, Gretchen Morgenson, along with Josh Rosner, had written a book, Reckless Endangerment, that blamed the financial crisis largely on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That certainly didn’t penetrate; he’s now back in full-blinder mode refusing to look at facts—indeed, not even reading the things he cites as facts—in order to make an ideological point that will keep him in tune with the editorial position of his employer.

Nocera’s column today follows the SEC’s suit against Fannie and Freddie executives for “materially false” disclosures about the exposure of each firm to subprime loans. News articles over the weekend make clear what the SEC is arguing, so I won’t do it in this piece. Suffice it to say that in order to claim that Fannie, Freddie, and their executives misstated their exposure to subprime loans, the SEC had to decide what a subprime loan was. Reasonably, as is clear from the complaints, they concluded that a subprime loan was one that had a higher rate of serious delinquency (more than 90 days overdue) than a prime loan. It turns out that the standards used by the SEC are more inclusive than those my American Enterprise Institute colleague Ed Pinto and I have been using, and more inclusive than those I used in my dissent from the majority report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Fannie and Freddie had even more low quality loans than we’d thought.

But Nocera’s column is full of errors that show he has not—as he claimed—read the complaints. For example, he states that there are “no damning e-mails in the complaint, with executives contradicting their public statements.” No. No e-mails, but the complaint against Freddie has something worse—that, over many years, the firm coded hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgages it was acquiring as “subprime” or “subprime-like,” even though its executives were reporting to the public and investors that their exposure to subprime loans was “less than 1 percent.” As to e-mails, those have already been published in an article by Charles Calomiris in the Wall Street Journal several weeks ago. He quoted from the chief risk officer of Freddie telling the chairman that the loans they were buying were poor quality and would cause losses. But the risk officer was ignored.

Even more seriously, he notes that the complaints didn’t have any “default data.” Leaving aside the question of whether that was necessary to show material misstatements about their subprime exposures, the complaints cite high rates of “serious delinquency,” which is of course a mortgage that is virtually in default, but not yet foreclosed. Since Fannie and Freddie are now insolvent, and have already cost the taxpayers about $150 billion, one would think there would be little argument about whether the loans they held were in fact subprime. But Nocera manages to do so, largely by following the absurd argument—another product of the left-wing echo-chamber—that Fannie and Freddie’s loans were not subprime because others were worse.

Now, in Noceraworld, even the SEC is part of the Wallison/Pinto cabal. Nocera writes: “The [SEC’s] complaint is extraordinarily weak. Taking cues from the Wallison/Pinto school of inflated data, it claims that Fannie and Freddie failed to reveal to investors the true extent of their subprime portfolios.” Ah, the power! I hope we can exercise it responsibly.

Gingrich's Past vs. Romney & Obama's

2011-12-20T07:44:00.000-08:00

By Thomas Sowell

If Newt Gingrich were being nominated for sainthood, many of us would vote very differently from the way we would vote if he were being nominated for a political office.

What the media call Gingrich's "baggage" concerns largely his personal life and the fact that he made a lot of money running a consulting firm after he left Congress. This kind of stuff makes lots of talking points that we will no doubt hear, again and again, over the next weeks and months.

But how much weight should we give to this stuff when we are talking about the future of a nation?

This is not just another election and Barack Obama is not just another president whose policies we may not like. With all of President Obama's broken promises, glib demagoguery and cynical political moves, one promise he has kept all too well. That was his boast on the eve of the 2008 election: "We are going to change the United States of America."

Many Americans are already saying that they can hardly recognize the country they grew up in. We have already started down the path that has led Western European nations to the brink of financial disaster.

Internationally, it is worse. A president who has pulled the rug out from under our allies, whether in Eastern Europe or the Middle East, tried to cozy up to our enemies, and has bowed low from the waist to foreign leaders certainly has not represented either the values or the interests of America. If he continues to do nothing that is likely to stop terrorist-sponsoring Iran from getting nuclear weapons, the consequences can be beyond our worst imagining.

Against this background, how much does Newt Gingrich's personal life matter, whether we accept his claim that he has now matured or his critics' claim that he has not? Nor should we sell the public short by saying that they are going to vote on the basis of tabloid stuff or media talking points, when the fate of this nation hangs in the balance.

Even back in the 19th century, when the scandal came out that Grover Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock -- and he publicly admitted it -- the voters nevertheless sent him to the White House, where he became one of the better presidents.

Do we wish we had another Ronald Reagan? We could certainly use one. But we have to play the hand we were dealt. And the Reagan card is not in the deck.

While the televised debates are what gave Newt Gingrich's candidacy a big boost, concrete accomplishments when in office are the real test. Gingrich engineered the first Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 40 years -- followed by the first balanced budget in 40 years. The media called it "the Clinton surplus" but all spending bills start in the House of Representatives, and Gingrich was Speaker of the House.

Speaker Gingrich also produced some long overdue welfare reforms, despite howls from liberals that the poor would be devastated. But nobody makes that claim any more.

Did Gingrich ruffle some feathers when he was Speaker of the House? Yes, enough for it to cost him that position. But he also showed that he could produce results.

In a world where we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available, the question is whether Newt Gingrich is better than Barack Obama -- and better than Mitt Romney.

Romney is a smooth talker, but what did he actually accomplish as governor of Massachusetts, compared to what Gingrich accomplished as Speaker of the House? When you don't accomplish much, you don't ruffle many feathers. But is that what we want?

Can you name one important positive thing that Romney accomplished as governor of Massachusetts? Can anyone? Does a candidate who represents the bland leading the bland increase the chances of victory in November 2012? A lot of candidates like that have lost, from Thomas E. Dewey to John McCain.

Those who want to concentrate on the baggage in Newt Gingrich's past, rather than on the nation's future, should remember what Winston Churchill said: "If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost." If that means a second term for Barack Obama, then it means lost big time.

Copyright 2011, Creators Syndicate Inc.

One president, please, with a side of Rice - Washington Times

2011-12-19T07:57:00.000-08:00

Republican diners haven't yet picked their entree, but they've narrowed it down to the steak or the fish. Still, just as interesting as their main course will be their side selection: Will they go for a drab salad, or something more exciting? Maybe a spicy Rice dish?

Yes, that Rice: Condi. She's rested and ready - and buff.

America's first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting "antsy" to get back into the political game. "She's ready to go," said one top source.

Ready indeed. She still rises at 5:30 a.m. and runs through a vigorous P90X workout. (Her guns are now a match for those of first lady Michelle Obama.) Sure, she's been playing a lot of golf, and no doubt banging on the piano (sometimes with cellist Yo-Yo Ma), but she's clearly ready for more.

Her addition to the ticket, which wouldn't come until late next summer, would dramatically change the dynamics of the 2012 election. As a black woman - her family has roots in the Deep South stretching back to before Civil War era, and worked as sharecroppers after emancipation - she would mute Democrats' charges of racism among conservatives, especially tea party members. And her sex would likely prompt moderate women to take a serious look at the Republican ticket.

Plus, her selection would be a giant chess move to counter the expected replacement of Vice President Joseph R. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure, the White House denies and denies, but that should really make any political watcher more suspicious. One White House insider even told me that the position swap was the only reason Mrs. Clinton joined the administration in the first place.

Unlike 2008, when Miss Rice repeatedly played down all suggestions that she might like to join the Republican ticket as the vice presidential candidate, she is actively staying mum, while quietly encouraging speculation that she is ready to run.

Clearly, the 2012 election is shaping up to be all about the U.S. economy. Everything Mr. Obama has tried has failed, so American voters are looking for someone who can actually fix the problems. But what the Republican presidential hopefuls lack is foreign-policy experience.

Cue Miss Rice. With Vladimir Putin set to reascend to the Russian presidency, the Soviet scholar is perfectly suited for what's coming next.

Of course, like any black conservative (see Cain, Herman), she is mostly reviled in the black liberal community. In the midst of the Bush administration, Eugene Robinson, a columnist for The Washington Post, asked, "How did she come to a worldview so radically different from that of most black Americans?" Funny thing is, she is, unlike Barack Obama, an "American black."

And Miss Rice, in her inimitable way, had a response. "Why would I worry about something like that?" she said about the criticism. "The fact of the matter is I've been black all my life. Nobody needs to tell me how to be black."

The White House, through its Chicago mafia, was intent on taking out Mr. Cain. Unfortunately, he proved an easy target. But they were clearly frightened by a strong American black, even as a veep candidate. And yes, it won't be Mr. Cain - he is completely done.

But imagine the debate, whether it's against Mr. Biden or Mrs. Clinton: Miss Rice would bring a huge resume - not to mention a real understanding of the world, on which top Democrats seem to clueless. Talk to Iran? Um, maybe not. Negotiate with Mr. Putin: Been tried, doesn't work. And all issues of race would be moot.

There are a few other women available as down-ticket choices: Rep. Michele Bachmann will certainly be considered, as will Nikki Haley, the South Carolina governor who last week endorsed Mitt Romney. But nearly no one on the Republican side - man or woman - can deliver what Miss Rice can. And while you haven't yet heard her name when the political pundits tick off the top tier of vice-presidential players, you're about to. Starting today.

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at jcurl@washingtontimes.com.

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Daily Maverick :: Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton: gentlemen adventurers of Antarctic

2011-12-14T07:33:00.000-08:00

Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton: gentlemen adventurers of Antarctic

For men of the early twentieth century, the polar caps were the last real geographic extremities remaining to be conquered and explored. The goal of reaching the South Pole first set up a classic competition between British and Norwegian explorers, Robert F Scott and Roald Amundsen. J BROOKS SPECTOR looks back on the race into nothingness.
Tweet

Twenty-five years ago, I helped put together an international festival in Japan to celebrate the spirit of exploration. The project was the brainchild of Yuichiro Miura, the man who had once skied down Mt. Everest – and then climbed it again at the age of 75, just because it was there. Miura had also arranged for Sir Edmund Hillary, the man who had first conquered that mountain, to join this event. My task was to bring a team of active duty US astronauts to participate. All of these explorers were obviously brave – but they were also unusually modest and much given to denigrating their own uniqueness – whatever they had done was only because they were part of a larger team.

A subtext for the gathering was to add a final punctuation mark at the end of the age of Earth-bound exploration and – in those more innocent years before the Challenger disaster – to encourage the redirection of humanity’s energies onward into space exploration. We now know, of course, that it would be much harder, but then we could have learned much of that from a contemplation of the varied fates of the three contemporary polar explorers – Amundsen, Shackleton and Scott – as well.

The great terrestrial age of exploration, of course, had begun in the fifteenth century with the early voyages of men like Vasco da Gama and Columbus; continued through great voyages of exploration and science like those of Cook, Franklin and Darwin; and then reached a culmination with Amundsen’s march across Antarctica to the South Pole, a hundred years ago on 14 or 15 December (depending on which day of the antipodean International Date Line he had been standing on).

For men of the early twentieth century, save for a few mountains like Everest and K-2, the polar caps were the last real geographic extremities remaining to be conquered and explored. The optimism of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras made it seem certain everything was within the grasp of humankind – or shortly would be. Once Robert Peary and Mathew Henson had reached the North Pole in 1909 (even though their achievement remains disputed by champions of another would-be claimant, Frederick Cook), Antarctica was the one big geographic prize left. However, British derring-do and a near-mythic stiff upper lip – plus more lethal romanticism and obdurateness – were outdone by meticulous Scandanavian planning and preparation. The goal of reaching the South Pole first ultimately set up a classic competition between British and Norwegian explorers, Robert F Scott and Roald Amundsen.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott had already commanded a UK government-funded expedition to the Antarctic in 1901-04, years before his fatal journey. Scott’s three-man party joined him with his friend, Dr Edward Wilson and another adventurer-scientist, Ernest Shackleton. This expedition came within 660km of the Pole – and Scott returned home a national hero. However, following this trip, Scott and Shackleton had a less than friendly parting of the ways, leading Shackleton to skipper his own four-man expedition in 1907-09. This privately supported effort got a far as 160km of the Pole on 9 January 1909 before they too were forced to turn back. As a US Public Broadcasting Corporation documentary described Shackleton’s expedition:

“Shackleton earned the admiration of generations of explorers by making the agonising decision to turn back within 97 miles of the pole rather than risk the lives of his men. Writing to his wife Emily, he quipped, ‘I thought you'd rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.’ A second party, including Sir Douglas Mawson, was the first to reach the South Magnetic Pole with an epic 1,260-mile march and to scale the volcanic Mount Erebus. The expedition also supported significant scientific research.”

Robert Falcon Scott

When Scott learned that his former expedition mate’s latest effort had also failed, Scott decided to go for a second try. Given his own status as a certified national hero, Scott ended up making his preparations under the glare of full-on media attention, unaware that yet another rival was secretly planning to claim the prize instead.

Norwegian Captain Roald Amundsen was also a highly regarded explorer, having navigated the North West Passage above Canada and Alaska, as well as having been one of the first men to winter south of the Antarctic Circle. Amundsen’s dream since childhood had been to be the first person to reach the North Pole, but once that goal was snapped from his grasp, he turned his attention southward instead. In contrast to Scott’s efforts, Amundsen carried out his preparations close-hold to prevent anyone from trying to stop him.

Meanwhile Scott continued with his highly public prep, even deciding to take along some paying guests, such as army captain Lawrence Oates who volunteered to take charge of the draft ponies. Scott’s expedition left Cardiff in June 1910. En route to the Antarctic, Scott stopped in Australia where he received an enigmatic telegram from the Atlantic island of Madeira that read: “Beg leave to inform you Fram [Amundsen’s ship] proceeding Antarctic. Amundsen”.

Amundsen, still playing a very close hand, did not tell his crew where they were headed until reaching Madeira, where he offered them the opportunity to disembark if they wished – although none did. Amundsen’s team all had significant experience in the Arctic and he was convinced that using cross-country skis and sled dogs would be the best way to carry out a race across the Antarctic.

In January, Scott’s party set up camp on Ross Island in McMurdo Sound, just off the continent. Scott had planned to use the route Shackleton had pioneered, up the Beardmore Glacier and then on to the Polar Plateau to the actual goal. Prior to the actual run, his supply teams set up food and equipment caches along the planned route. However, these advance trips led to breakdowns of Scott’s motorised transports and also inflicted real suffering on his draft ponies. As a result, the main “One Ton” supply depot ended up being placed less far south than Scott had planned – setting in motion some of the fatal problems that doomed Scott’s return from the Pole.

By contrast, Amundsen had correctly guessed there was a viable alternative to the Shackleton route. The Norwegian expedition arrived at the Bay of Whales in January, about 640km from the British camp, and they took a risk in placing their base camp on the ice sheet. Using dog teams to preposition supplies, these were placed further south than Scott's supplies. Amundsen set off for the Pole early in the season but severe temperatures of -40°C drove the Norwegians back to their base, leading to a mutiny among the team. Amundsen then regrouped and dropped the size of the Polar party from eight down to five and this smaller group left for their race to the Pole on 20 October, using some fifty dogs in teams.

Roald Amundsen

Ten days later, Scott left his own base camp with support parties, motorised sleds, dogs and ponies for his own run at the Pole. Amundsen was aware of Scott's motorised transports (certainly an innovation back in 1911) but he did not know that mechanical failures had led to their abandonment, setting Scott’s run in trouble from the beginning. Along the way, it became clear that his ponies were unsuited for the extreme conditions and they were successively killed to provide meat for the explorer team. Eventually the men began to pull their supply sleds themselves after the dog teams were sent back as well – something that exhausted the men as well. As a BBC documentary described Scott’s motivation in making the men haul their supplies explained, it “was exhausting work but Scott believed it was less cruel than using animals and more noble.”

By contrast, Amundsen’s group was making fast progress via the Axel Heiberg Glacier and across the Polar Plateau. And at 3pm on 15 December 1911 (or 14 December, depending on that date line question), the Norwegians reached the Pole where expedition team member Olav Bjaaland took the historic photos and Amundsen wrote in his diary, “So we arrived and were able to plant our flag at the geographical South Pole. God be thanked!” Amundsen's tasks now were to make a safe return and be first with the news of his achievement.

By then, Scott had chosen his final team for the last push, adding a fifth man to the group, Scotsman Lt. Henry “Birdie” Bowers, because his character appealed to Scott. Bowers was strong, versatile and determined. However, while making it a five-man group supplemented manpower, it created new difficulties with rations and fuel.

Scott and his final team reached the Pole on 17 January 1912; but it was more than a month after Amundsen had left. Bowers saw the Norwegian camp and cached supplies, as well as their marker flag and a note for Scott to deliver to the Norwegian king in the event Amundsen did not make it home. But by that time the temperature had dropped even lower than it had been for Amundsen. As a result, Scott’s diary entry was significantly gloomier than his rival’s: “The POLE. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected. Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

Then Scott’s men began to die. Petty Officer Evans died on 17 February. A month later, Captain Oates, now crippled with frostbite, walked out of the party's tent on his 32nd birthday. Scott wrote Oates had said as he left “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Scott added “We knew that Oates was walking to his death... it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman.” Only a few days later, the three remaining team members were waiting for death in a swirling blizzard, even as their supply depot was just 17kms away. Scott’s last diary entry read “We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more – R Scott.”

Thirty-five years later, English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote the musical score for the heroic UK film, “Scott of the Antarctic”. He eventually reshaped the themes into his evocative “Symphony Antarctica”. Besides the usual orchestra and an augmented percussion section, Vaughan Williams added the organ, a women’s chorus, a solo soprano, a narrator and a wind machine.

The composer selected texts to come at the beginning of each movement, drawing from works by Shelley; Psalm 104; Coleridge and Scott’s own diary entry that read: “I do not regret this journey; we took risks, we knew we took them, things have come out against us, therefore we have no cause for complaint.”

Well-loved recordings of this work feature Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson for the voiceovers. The work makes it easy to contemplate Scott’s doomed expedition – and, with it, the passing of the last vestiges of splendid amateurism in exploration. DM

Japan's Terrible Miscalculation

2011-12-08T05:12:00.001-08:00

Japan's Terrible Miscalculation - http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/285095/pearl-harbor-day-infamy-jim-lacey

On Pearl Harbor

2011-12-07T12:47:00.001-08:00

William Halsey could not hide his dismay and anger. When asked later about how America would recover, Halsey replied, “When this war is over the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.” America had found the first of its fighting admirals.

Barkley not invited to Heisman ceremony

2011-12-05T21:42:00.001-08:00

Reminds of all that is wrong with college football and why he current system must be brought down. One of the nominees who was invited isn't even the best (best his numbers) at his position in the nation. How does that work and who do we burn at the stake for putting us through this?
Also, a possible winner could be someone suspended for doing wrong? Wasn't that the whole point behind handing USC their ass and screwing Barkley and others out of bowls and possible national titles & trophies.
It's fucking criminal and even coaches are now standing up and voicing this concern, which may (if espnsec allows) bring change to the system of college football as a while, but do not hold your breath due to the tv money involved.

Oh and how the eff does a two loss team get seated higher than every one loss team for a bowl they had no chance (in a normal world) of getting without some serious rigging?

Forget it. USC is not playing until next year, so until spring ball football is over for me.

Public-sector millionaires—Lawrence Mone - NYPOST.com

2011-12-01T10:11:00.000-08:00

Public-sector millionaires—Lawrence Mone - NYPOST.com

PAC 12 Commissioner Larry Scott must love this.

2011-11-29T19:25:00.001-08:00

Smooth move Larry! Putting on a sham show for the inaugural PAC 12 championship game. USC already beat both games playing in it, and now no one gives a rats ass about the outcome.

Siri knows the truth.

2011-11-29T18:25:00.001-08:00

Siri the new iPhone assistant knows just about everything there is to know about college football.

Obamacare Is Bigger than Roe v. Wade

2011-11-14T13:24:00.001-08:00

This morning, as expected, the Supreme Court agreed to take up Obamacare. What was unexpected — and unprecedented in modern times — is that it set aside five-and-a-half hours for the argument. Here are the issues the Court will decide:

Whether Congress has the power to enact the individual mandate. – 2 hours
Whether the challenge to the individual mandate is barred by the Anti-Injunction Act. – 1 hour
Whether and to what extent the individual mandate, if unconstitutional, is severable from the rest of the Act. – 90 minutes
Whether the new conditions on all federal Medicaid funding (expanding eligibility, greater coverage, etc.) constitute an unconstitutional coercion of the states. – 1 hour

In addition to the length of argument, which we can expect to be heard over multiple days in March or April, perhaps the biggest surprise is the Court’s decision to review that fourth issue. There is no circuit split here — in large part because 26 states are already in this one suit — and no judge has yet voted to uphold what also be described as a claim that the federal government is “commandeering” the states to do its bidding. The Court probably took the case precisely because so many states have brought it; that former solicitor general Paul Clement is their lawyer also doesn’t hurt. As a practical matter, this could be a bigger deal than the individual mandate because, while Congress had never before tried an economic mandate, it certainly does attach plenty of strings to the grants it gives states — and the spending power is thought to be even broader than the power to regulate commerce.

In any event, the Supreme Court has now set the stage for the most significant case since Roe v. Wade. Indeed, this litigation implicates the future of the Republic as Roe never did. On both the individual-mandate and Medicaid-coercion issues, the Court will decide whether the Constitution’s structure — federalism and enumeration of powers — is judicially enforceable or whether Congress is the sole judge of its own authority. In other words, do we have a government of laws or men?

Throw Them All Out – Including Politico

2011-11-14T12:43:00.000-08:00

Throw Them All Out – Including <em>Politico</em>

Natural Gas Will Repower America

2011-10-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

Natural Gas Will Repower America

Wall Street protesters should march on Washington--Stephen B. Meister - NYPOST.com

2011-10-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

Wall Street protesters should march on Washington--Stephen B. Meister - NYPOST.com

"Fast And Furious" Just Might Be President Obama's Watergate

2011-09-29T15:27:00.000-07:00

Frank Miniter, who wrote this piece, is the author of Saving the Bill of Rights and The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide.

Why a gunrunning scandal codenamed “Fast and Furious,” a program run secretly by the U.S. government that sent thousands of firearms over an international border and directly into the hands of criminals, hasn’t been pursued by an army of reporters all trying to be the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein is a story in itself.

But the state of modern journalism aside, this scandal is so inflammatory few realize that official records show the current director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), B. Todd Jones — yes the individual the Obama administration brought in to replace ATF Director Kenneth Melson Aug. 30 in an effort to deflect congressional criticism — also has questions to answer about his involvement in this gunrunning scandal.

Fast and Furious was an operation so cloak-and-dagger Mexican authorities weren’t even notified that thousands of semi-automatic firearms were being sold to people in Arizona thought to have links to Mexican drug cartels. According to ATF whistleblowers, in 2009 the U.S. government began instructing gun storeowners to break the law by selling firearms to suspected criminals. ATF agents then, again according to testimony by ATF agents turned whistleblowers, were ordered not to intercept the smugglers but rather to let the guns “walk” across the U.S.-Mexican border and into the hands of Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.

When the Gunrunning Program Began

A Jan. 8, 2010 briefing paper from the ATF Phoenix Field Division Group VII says: “This investigation has currently identified more than 20 individual connected straw purchasers…. To date (September 2009-present) this group has purchased in excess of 650 firearms (mainly AK-47 variants) for which they have paid cash totaling more than $350,000.”

This is an important fact because the U.S. Justice Department hasn’t made it clear to tell congressional investigators when the Fast and Furious operation began and who authorized it; as a result, this ATF briefing paper’s mention of September 2009 is thus far the earliest we can trace the operation.

The next important event we know of occurred in October 2009 when the ATF’s Phoenix Field Division established a gun-trafficking group called “Group VII.” Group VII began using the strategy of allowing suspects to walk away with illegally purchased guns, according to a report from the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the staff of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. The report says, “The purpose was to wait and watch, in hope that law enforcement could identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large, complex conspiracy case…. Group VII initially began using the new gunwalking tactics in one of its investigations to further the Department’s strategy. The case was soon renamed ‘Operation Fast and Furious.’”

This report and later official explanations from the ATF say the Fast and Furious program was created to deal with the problem that arresting low-level suspects doesn’t necessarily help ATF agents get to the heads of Mexican cartels.

On Oct. 26, 2009, a month or so after Fast and Furious seems to have been initiated, a document shows that a teleconference was held between 13 officials. One of the issues discussed was the possible “adoption of the Department’s strategy for Combating Mexican Drug Cartels.” The officials listed to have been in on the call included Kenneth Melson, who was then the director of the ATF, Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI and a number of attorneys with the U.S. Department of Justice. B. Todd Jones, the current director of the ATF, was not listed in the document, but the title he held in September 2009 is listed as being in on the conference call. It doesn’t take much reporting to find out that in September 2009 Jones was the chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee (AGAC) and so was at least supposed to be in on the conference call. (When asked about the teleconference, an ATF spokeswoman told us “we don’t discuss active investigations.”)

Of course, we don’t know precisely what was discussed in the teleconference, but given that the Fast and Furious program likely began a month or more before the teleconference, and given that it was a new program designed to send firearms over an international border, it would seem odd if Fast and Furious was not discussed and therefore that Jones, at the very least, had heard about the program in October 2009; though, unless further documents come out as to what was said, he certainly has deniability.

Gun Storeowners Become Pawns

For political context we now need to step back to April 16, 2009 — four or five months before we think Fast and Furious began. On this day President Barack Obama was visiting Mexico. While there he said, “This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States … more than 90% of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border.”

This 90% statistic was, to be kind, math so shoddy a third grader should know better.

The figure was based only on guns the Mexican government sent to the ATF for tracing. On April 2, 2009, Fox News reported that, according to statistics from the Mexican government, only about a third of the guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico are submitted to the ATF. The Mexicans, as it turns out, only send guns to the ATF they think came from the U.S. Also, many guns submitted to the ATF by the Mexicans cannot be traced. As a result, the reporters determined that only 17% of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced by the ATF to the U.S.

Now, because President Obama used the made-up 90% figure to push political positions — he was using the statistic to argue that the U.S. needs more gun-control laws — it’s difficult not to sniff politics in what happened next.

Later in 2009 the ATF started the Fast and Furious program by allowing firearms to be smuggled from U.S. gun stores into the arsenals of Mexican criminal gangs. As these guns wouldn’t be seen again until they resurfaced in crimes (there were no tracking devices installed or other means to trace these guns), the only purpose for letting these guns “walk” seems to be to back up the president’s position that guns used in Mexican crimes mostly come from the U.S. (Though the Obama administration insists the gun sales were a part of a new crime-fighting technique.) Also, given the cover up that has ensued since Fast and Furious broke, it doesn’t seem like a conspiratorial leap to conclude that politics mixed with policy to create this crazy program. (But again, administration officials insist this wasn’t about politics.)

Gun storeowners have a right to think it was about politics.

Sometime around September 2009, ATF agents began pressuring gun storeowners in Arizona to sell firearms to people the ATF thought would sell the guns to Mexican cartels and gangs. As gun-storeowners can’t do business without federal licenses, and because the ATF has the authority to shut down a gun store if the establishment’s paperwork isn’t in order, these requests were likely taken as orders. This put the gun storeowners in a catch-22: the law requires them to report suspicious activity and not to sell to people they think are breaking the law, yet the ATF was telling them to sell to suspicious people who wanted to buy AK-47s by the dozen.

Actually, it’s even worse than that: According to court records obtained by Fox News, two of 20 alleged smugglers who were later indicted in the Fast and Furious investigation had felony convictions. As gun-stores must run a person’s name through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) before selling that person a firearm, this should have stopped these felons from buying even one measly.22 rifle.

Congressional and law-enforcement sources say this situation suggests the FBI, which operates the NICS system, had to have knowingly allowed the purchases to go forward after consulting with the ATF. Given that we know the director of the FBI was in on at least one early meeting on this issue, this seems logical.

One store, Lone Wolf Trading Company in Glendale, Ariz., soon became the smuggler’s favorite. Andre Howard, owner of Lone Wolf Trading Company, declined to comment to us about Fast and Furious because he is under a congressional subpoena; however, recordings taped by Howard of him speaking to an ATF agent have been released by the U.S. Department of Justice. One of the suspects the ATF was watching as he bought guns from Lone Wolf Trading Company was Jaime Avila. He allegedly bought AK-47s at Lone Wolf Trading Company that turned up at a crime scene in which drug smugglers killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent (more on this to come). The other was Uriel Patino. As the ATF watched, he bought hundreds of firearms from Lone Wolf Trading Company and reportedly sold them to Mexico’s brutal Sinoloa drug cartel

Meanwhile, on March 10, 2010, an internal e-mail from George T. Gillett Jr., assistant special agent in charge to David Voth, the ATF’s Phoenix Group VII supervisor, and others, said that ATF Acting Director Melson and ATF Deputy Director Billy Hoover “are being briefed weekly on this investigation and the recent success with [redacted] so they are both keenly interested in case updates.”

This email was released by Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) just before a June 15, 2011 investigative hearing of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee to show that officials in Washington, D.C., knew about this program.

As it turns out, ATF leadership was actually able to follow some of these illegal purchases live on closed-circuit television. In a news release in June 2011, Rep. Issa said as much: “Acting Director Melson was able to sit at his desk in Washington and himself watch a live feed of straw buyers entering the gun stores and purchasing dozens of AK-47 variants.”

Given that the director of the ATF, a department that is overseen by the U.S. Justice Department, was watching closed-circuit television of illegal gun sales that officials knew were likely to cross the U.S.-Mexican border, is it even conceivable that Attorney General Eric Holder didn’t know about this secret program? And if he didn’t, shouldn’t he have?

ATF Agents Begin Protesting

ATF field agents soon began to question the sanity of letting guns “walk.”

Evidently to quell internal dissension, on March 12, 2010 David Voth, the ATF’s Phoenix Group VII supervisor, sent an e-mail to field agents that said, “Whether you care or not people of rank and authority at HQ are paying close attention to this case and they also believe we (Phoenix Group VII) are doing what they envisioned the Southwest Border Groups doing.” Voth’s e-mail went on to say, “It may sound cheesy, but we are ‘The Tip of the ATF spear’ when it comes to Southwest Border Firearms Trafficking. We need to resolve our issues at this meeting. I will be damned if this case is going to suffer due to petty arguing, rumors or other adolescent behavior. If you don’t think this is fun you’re in the wrong line of work — period.”

ATF field agents were sending protests up their chain of command, because, as ATF Special Agent John Dodson told the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee on June 15, 2011, he and fellow agents were regularly ordered to abandon surveillance of suspicious gun purchases “knowing all the while that just days after these purchases, the guns that we saw these individuals buy would begin turning up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico.”

ATF Special Agent Olindo James Casa also said at the June hearing that “on several occasions I personally requested to interdict or seize firearms, but I was always ordered to stand down and not to seize the firearms.”

Meanwhile, Mexican drug cartels were evidently finished sighting in their U.S.-bought AK-47′s and looking for bigger guns. On April 2, 2010, Voth sent an email to a government-redacted recipient that said, “Our subjects purchased 359 firearms during the month of March alone, to include numerous Barrett .50 caliber rifles.” These .50-caliber rifles are used for sniping by U.S. Special Forces and are a favorite of long-range shooters in America.

So far ATF officials seemed to be blissfully ignorant of how misguided this strategy would turn out to be.

Just as ATF agents feared, on Dec. 14, 2010, in the dark of night in a remote canyon in Rio Rico, Ariz., some of the firearms sent over the border to arm Mexican drug runners were used in a gun battle with the U.S. Border Patrol. During the gunfight, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, 40, was killed by suspected operatives of a Mexican drug-smuggling organization. After a battle that U.S. Border Patrol officers started by shooting bean bags at smugglers armed with AK-47s, police arrested four suspects and recovered three firearms from the scene that have since been traced to Fast and Furious.

Dodson’s greatest fear had become reality. He said before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee: “We knew the next time we’d see the guns would be at crime scenes. And not the first crime these guns were used in, but at the last.”

When asked how he thought sending guns into Mexico could lead to busts of drug cartels, Dodson replied, “I have never heard an explanation from anyone involved in Operation Fast and Furious that I believe would justify what we did.”

If that wasn’t moving enough, during the same congressional hearing held last June, Josephine Terry — the mother of slain U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry — was asked if there is anything she would like to say to whomever approved Fast and Furious. After taking a moment to regain her composure, she said, “I don’t know what I would say to them, but I would like to know what they would say to me.”

Right after the shooting, we do know what some ATF officials were saying to each other. The day after Agent Terry was killed an e-mail exchange among ATF agents at 7:45 p.m. confirmed that two of the weapons that Jaime Avila had purchased as part of Operation Fast and Furious were found at Terry’s murder scene. The names on the e-mail were redacted by the government, but the email says, “The two firearms recovered by ATF this afternoon near Rio Rico, Arizona, in conjunction with the shooting death of U.S. Border Patrol agent Terry were identified as ‘Suspect Guns’ in the Fast and Furious investigation [REDACTED].” A third gun was later linked to the scene.

The Cover Up Begins

About five weeks before Agent Terry was slain, the 2010 election took place and the U.S. House of Representatives succumbed to Republican control in January 2011. This gave Rep. Issa a chance to investigate as whistleblowers came forward.

Meanwhile, as freshmen congressmen were settling into their new offices, on Jan.19, 2011, the ATF finally arrested the straw purchasers. On Jan. 25, 2011 Phoenix Special Agent in Charge William Newell held a press conference announcing the indictment of 20 people the ATF had been watching purchase firearms. However, when asked if agents purposefully allowed weapons to enter Mexico, Newell said, “Hell, no.” (In a “supplemental statement,” provided to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on July 26, 2011, Newell clarified his statements by saying agents did not knowingly allow thousands of weapons to reach criminal hands.)

Evidence soon showed this to be less than true.

On Jan. 27, 2011, Sen. Grassley wrote a letter to ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson that said: “Members of the Judiciary Committee have received numerous allegations that the ATF sanctioned the sale of hundreds of assault weapons to suspected straw purchasers, who then allegedly transported these weapons throughout the southwestern border area and into Mexico….”

Grassley requested that the ATF brief his staff on the matter.

Days later, on Jan. 31, 2011, Grassley wrote a second letter to Melson that claimed whistleblowers were being targeted. Grassley wrote, “This is exactly the wrong sort of reaction for the ATF. Rather than focusing on retaliating against whistleblowers, the ATF’s sole focus should be on finding and disclosing the truth as soon as possible.”

Despite growing evidence, on Feb. 4, 2011, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote Sen. Grassley and denied that the U.S. Justice Department “sanctioned” the sale of guns to people they believed were going to deliver them to Mexican drug cartels.

Then, on Feb. 15, 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata was murdered in Mexico. The Associated Press reported (on Feb. 28), based on an unnamed source, that the weapon used to kill Zapata “was shipped through Laredo with the possible knowledge of the ATF.”

A week later, on Feb. 23, 2011, CBS Evening News ran a story on Operation Fast and Furious that included interviews with ATF whistleblowers who said they’d objected to the program. With pressure building, on March 8, 2011, the U.S. Justice Department told Sen. Grassley that the matter would be reviewed by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General; however, this internal investigation seems to have become the official excuse for not giving congressional investigators everything they’re demanding.

On March 22, 2011 President Obama was finally asked about Operation Fast and Furious. The question came from Univision, a Spanish-language network. “Well, first of all,” answered President Obama, “I did not authorize [Fast and Furious]. Eric Holder, the attorney general, did not authorize it. There may be a situation here in which a serious mistake was made. If that’s the case, then we’ll find — find out and we’ll hold somebody accountable.”

On May 3, 2011, Attorney General Holder testified to the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Darrell Issa and Holder had an exchange about Operation Fast and Furious. After a series of questions, Holder answered, “I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”

Rep. Issa hasn’t been satisfied with this answer. He later said, “Are we confident that Eric Holder knew it much earlier? No. Did he know it earlier than he testified? Absolutely.”

On June 29, 2011 a reporter asked President Obama about the matter at a White House news conference. Obama said in part: “I’m not going to comment on the current investigation…. As soon as the investigation is complete, appropriate action will be taken.”

But just days later, on July 4, 2011, Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson surprised some by speaking to congressional investigators from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. Melson met with investigators with his personal attorney present — not Justice Department attorneys.

The next day Rep. Issa and Sen. Grassley wrote a letter to Attorney General Holder about Melson’s testimony. The letter says Melson “claimed that ATF’s senior leadership would have preferred to be more cooperative with our inquiry much earlier in the process. However, he said that Justice Department officials directed them not to respond and took full control of replying to briefing and document requests from Congress.”

Melson was pointing to a cover up at the U.S. Justice Department while refusing to be a scapegoat. However, Tracy Schmaler, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice, said to us on Sept. 27, 2011 that no cover up is occurring. He said, “We have turned over thousands of documents, just what documents do you want?

Obviously perplexed with what to do with Melson, the U.S. Justice Department moved Melson to a new post inside the ATF, a position that protects his retirement package. Perhaps this is some of the “appropriate action” President Obama said would be taken, if so, more appropriate action soon followed.

The Obama administration next promoted some of the officials who ran the program. William G. McMahon, who was the ATF’s deputy director of operations in the West, William D. Newell, and David Voth, who were both field supervisors who oversaw the Fast and Furious program out of the agency’s Phoenix office, were promoted to positions in Washington, D.C. Voth is the one who said in an email, “If you don’t think [Fast and Furious] is fun you’re in the wrong line of work — period.” And, when asked if guns were being allowed to cross the southern border, Newell is the one who said, “Hell, no.” Yet both got cushy desk jobs in D.C.

Then, as if to shine a spotlight on how political the Fast and Furious operation always was, last August the Obama administration announced new firearm-reporting regulations that gun stores in southern border states must follow—this when gun storeowners have done everything asked of them and as the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association that represents firearms manufacturers, pays for a longstanding program called “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy” (www.dontlie.org ) that combats illegal gun sales by raising awareness.

Also, the National Rifle Association has been on top of this story from the beginning. Chris W. Cox, the NRA’s chief lobbyist now says, “It would be a serious miscarriage of justice if no one is held accountable for this deadly scandal. The President and his Justice Department cannot run away from this. The NRA will make sure that every member, hunter, gun owner, and indeed every American, knows the truth about this reckless operation.”

Given all the politics and the cover up that even the former ATF director says has occurred, could operation Fast and Furious have been about anything other than pushing for new gun-control laws? And given all of this obfuscation from the Obama administration, isn’t this scandal comparable to the cover up that surrounded Watergate? After all, both administrations forgot that America is a country that reveres its freedom of the press and that in America officers speak out when misguided policies get cops killed. Here mothers testify before Congress when they find out a secret government program, and a stupid one at that, got their son killed.

Not that morality ends at the American border. To stress this point, Rep. Issa held a conference call with journalists on September 21 in which he said Marisela Morales, Mexico’s attorney general, is reporting that at least 200 Mexican deaths can now be traced to weapons from the Fast and Furious program.

And so the investigation and the bloody aftermath continue….

Frank Miniter is the author of Saving the Bill of Rights and The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide

ObamaCare: It Can Only Get Worse

2011-09-29T14:16:00.001-07:00

By Debra Saunders

On Tuesday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan gave a talk at Stanford's Hoover Institution on what should become the Republican Party's template behind its bid to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Ryan cited the unintended consequences that employer-paid health care plans have delivered: "The system that shields us from the cost of services has actually left us paying much, much more."

On the same day, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report that bolstered Ryan's argument. Over the past year, average annual cost for employer-sponsored health care plans rose 9 percent. Premiums have more than doubled since 2001. The average annual premium is now $15,073 per family -- and that doesn't include out-of-pocket payments.

With premiums rising higher than inflation, those numbers are biting into workers' paychecks. And there's little employers can do other than raise employee contributions from an average of $1,787 per family 10 years ago to $4,129 today.

The Affordable Care Act, signed by President Barack Obama, was supposed to rein in runaway health care costs. How's that going? Not as advertised. Even before the ACA takes full effect in 2014, today's mandates -- such as a requirement that employers offer coverage for adult children up to the age of 26 and that some plans provide free preventive care -- must be a factor in the cost spurt. The Kaiser report estimates that 2.3 million adult children were added to their parents' employer-sponsored plans because of the law.

Democrats complain about employers choosing to sit on their money and not hire. But their health care mandates serve as a tax on hiring workers.

It can only get worse. As providers consolidate, consumers' options decrease. Ryan told reporters after his talk that he sees a future in which, as with utilities, there are a mere "handful" of providers. That can't be good for consumers.

Ryan is probably the bravest Republican in Washington, because he trusts voters enough to lay out a GOP alternative. He crafted a budget, passed by the House, that would change Medicare into a "defined contribution" program in 2022. In essence, seniors would receive vouchers to purchase their own health plans.

The idea was to give seniors a stake in holding down health costs and the options necessary to do so. (Obamacare tries to control Medicare costs through the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which can set payments -- and arguably drive doctors out of Medicare.)

The Hoover talk brought the defined-contribution approach to employer-sponsored health care.

Under the status quo, many employees have neither the motivation nor the wherewithal to shop for the best care at the best price. The GOP plan would provide a $5,700 refundable tax credit to families, but workers would pay income tax on their employers' contributions.

Savings could result in one of two ways. Employers would have more flexibility in choosing coverage. Or employees could choose their own plan -- and take it with them if they wanted to start a business.

The result would be universal care but in a system, Ryan told me in an interview, that "reconnects the buyer and the seller." The downside: It could be more work for consumers. The upside: Employees actually might be able to pocket future raises instead of handing them over to an insurance company.
dsaunders@sfchronicle.com

Holding Obama's Party Accountable

2011-09-29T10:57:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama is on a far worse political trajectory than Jimmy Carter was. First, the Democrats lost Sen. Ted Kennedy's seat to a Republican in ultraliberal Massachusetts who campaigned against Kennedy's signature issue of national health insurance. Nothing that dramatic happened while Carter was President.

Then Democrats suffered historic, grievous losses in the 2010 midterm elections, with a New Deal size loss in the House of 63 seats, and a loss of 6 seats in the Senate. In Jimmy Carter's 1978 midterms, Democrats lost only 15 seats in the House and 3 seats in the Senate.

Now in the recent special election in New York City, Democrats have begun to lose seats they haven't lost since before the New Deal.

That is so fitting, because President Obama is not an anomaly in today's Democrat party. Quite to the contrary, he represents the party's heart and soul today, which is well to the Left now even of George McGovern in 1972. Witness the reelection of Far Left San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi as House Democrat leader even after the historic voter repudiation of the Pelosi Democrat House majority in 2010. Witness the choice of Far Left screamer Debbie Wasserman Schultz as leader of the Democratic National Committee. Witness Obama EPA Chief Lisa Jackson, Obama Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, and the numerous similar, utterly clueless, ideologically rigid, far left appointees throughout the Obama Administration.

That is also so well deserved, because of what the Democrats are doing to our nation, even as their power starts to wane. Historically, for the American economy, the deeper the recession the stronger the recovery. Based on that historical record, we should be nearing the end of the second year of a booming recovery by now.

But almost four years after the last recession started, there still has been no real recovery. Unemployment is stuck over 9%, with unemployment among African-Americans, Hispanics, and teenagers at depression level double-digit rates for at least 2 years now. Real wages and incomes are falling, back to levels last seen over 30 years ago. Poverty is soaring to new records as well, with more Americans suffering in poverty than any time since the Census Bureau started keeping records over 50 years ago.

As a result, we are on track now for an historic conservative victory in 2012, far bigger even than in 1980.

The Do-Nothing Senate

In the Democrat majority-controlled Senate, 23 Democrat seats are subject to elections in 2012, with 6 of those open seats involving a retiring incumbent. Only 10 Republican seats are subject to election, with only two retirements from safe seats in Texas and Arizona. Let's compare the record of this Democrat-controlled Senate with the record of what the Republican-controlled House has already accomplished this year.

The first act of the Republican House was to pass repeal of Obamacare, reducing future taxes and spending by trillions. The Senate has failed to act on this at all.

The Republican House passed the budget proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, which would cut federal spending by $6.2 trillion over the first 10 years alone, and permanently balances the budget soon after that, as scored by CBO. Government spending as a percent of GDP would ultimately be reduced by 40% from current levels.

The Democrat-controlled Senate has failed to pass any budget at all, as required by law, for the second consecutive year now. At least they had the good sense to vote down Obama's proposed runaway budget, 97-0. But the failure to pass any budget leaves the government subject to possible shutdown this fall.

The Democrat Senate has also fought tooth and nail against every spending cut. They even threatened to shut down the entire government last week because the House Republicans funded emergency FEMA disaster relief spending with $1.5 billion in offsetting spending cuts, half of one thousandth of the entire federal budget. The cuts were to a Department of Energy corporate welfare loan program, like the program that just lost half a billion in taxpayer funds in the Solyndra bankruptcy scandal. Senate Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid said this microscopic spending cut to a program with no valid justification was "not an honest effort at compromise," as quoted in USA Today on Monday. The shutdown was averted only because FEMA decided it didn't need the emergency funding after all, meaning the Senate Democrats were successful in nullifying the negligible spending cut.

The House also passed a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would eliminate the government's power to run a deficit and increase the national debt. The Democrat-controlled Senate has failed to pass it.

To restore the creation of new jobs, the House passed the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act, which would stop the imposition of federal regulatory burdens on farmers and small businesses that would impede job creation. The Democrat-controlled Senate has failed to do anything to stop the runaway regulatory burdens of the Obama Administration, killing jobs and the economy.

The House has also passed the Energy Tax Prevention Act, prohibiting any federal agency from imposing a national energy tax, which would only further destroy jobs and shortcircuit economic recovery. But the Democrat-controlled Senate has failed to act on it.

To restore the production of American energy, creating new high paying jobs and producing increased federal revenues from the resulting increased economic growth, the House has passed the Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work Act, the Reversing President Obama's Offshore Moratorium Act, the Restarting American Offshore Leasing Now Act, and the Jobs and Energy Permitting Act. The House has also passed the North American-Made Energy Security Act, which would require the federal government to determine by a date certain whether to allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline bringing Canadian oil to America's Gulf refineries. That would produce tens of thousands of new jobs and billions in increased federal revenues, but approval has been pending for the entire nearly 3 years of the Obama Administration.

But the Democrat-controlled Senate has failed to act on any of these bills either.

The House has also passed The Consumer Financial Protection and Soundness Improvement Act, which would restrict the new unelected Consumer Financial Protection Bureau adopted in Obama's Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill from imposing any regulations that hurt job growth. Once again, no action from the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Obama, now campaigning for reelection non-stop around the country, is already trying to blame a Do-Nothing Congress for his failures. But the Republican-controlled House has already been quite active in passing legislation to address the nation's problems. It is the Do-Nothing Democrat-controlled Senate that has failed to act on any of the House's accomplishments or even pass a budget as required by law, effectively failing to show up for work.

It is the 23 Democrats whose seats are up for election this year, almost half of all Senate Democrats, that make this Senate record possible, fighting to the bitter end even the smallest budget cut. Make sure your friends, neighbors and relatives know that by the time the election rolls around next year. Make sure they don't get fooled again by Democrat candidates claiming they are different, and not Obamanistas. Every one of those Democrat Senate seats make the Obama record of trashing America possible.

Keeping Faith with the Voters, to Their Political Risk

House Republicans, indeed, fought bravely and successfully in insisting this past summer on spending cuts equal to the debt limit increase, forcing some major spending cuts on President Obama and Senate Democrats. But the Republicans have suffered in the polls for doing so. How dare they demand such spending cuts instead of just routinely approving the debt increase as in the past?

But the House Republican majority was elected precisely to end business as usual in Washington in regard to spending, deficits and debt. What they did during the debt limit fight only kept faith with the voters that overwhelmingly elected them in 2010.

The Washington Post, however, reported on September 24, "Polls showed that voters were appalled by what they viewed as a naked display of political brinkmanship that risked destabilizing the U.S. economy." GOP pollster Bill McInturff was cited as concluding that "Voters lost faith [during the debt limit fight] in the ability of both President Obama and Congressional Republicans to 'make the right decisions about the economy.'" But McInturff said, "congressional Republicans had taken the bigger hit…with 81 percent of those surveyed saying they had little or no confidence in the judgment of the GOP."

The Post also cited veteran political analyst Charlie Cook as saying over the debt limit fight that "if lawmakers continue down this path, the 2012 election could bring the biggest, broadest anti-incumbent year of postwar history, with voters indiscriminately tossing out lawmakers in both parties." Cook is quoted as saying, "I don't know what these guys think they're doing, but it looks like they're committing political suicide."

Even some libertarians I know who have condemned Republicans in the past for failing to cut spending think they went too far in demanding spending cuts in the debt limit fight. Yet some Tea Party grassroots activists condemn House Republicans for too easily giving in without getting enough in spending cuts.

A Paul Revere Moment: America at Risk

This raises an important, fundamental question. Is the Right becoming too fractured to hold together to give Obama and the Democrats the beating in 2012 they have so richly earned? The decentralized Tea Party has so far been mostly brilliant in maintaining political effectiveness while not breaking apart the opposition to Obama. Libertarians have to recognize as well we are dealing with a new, mortal danger to the nation in the Obamanistas. Every patriot has to think through how to be most effective politically in reversing the Left's so far soft authoritarian coup in Obama’s Democrat party.

House Speaker John Boehner and his House majority need to stop being so passive in taking the verbal broadsides of Obama and the Democrat-controlled media. They have one unexploited advantage. They each have home districts all across the country where they are all well known and have thorough access to the media. They need to pursue a more aggressive campaign mode media strategy in getting the word out now on their record and the issues to their local districts. They need to recognize Obama has started campaign 2012 now and start competing on the issues.

The voters have a responsibility too not to be so easily misled by the Democrat-controlled media, and to help spread the word locally to those who are not paying enough attention. This is a Paul Revere moment. America is fundamentally at risk. Patriots need to act now with effective, organizing political action to save the country from an ongoing Marxist takeover.

A crucial battle is going on right now in the Republican presidential race, which the conservatives are presently losing. Too many conservatives in the race are dividing up the conservative vote and leaving the lead to the more moderate. Republicans need to nominate an articulate leader who can take on Obama in debate, and who will make the most of the sweeping conservative victory in store, like Reagan did. We need to have more focus both on who is credible in taking on Obama, and who has the principled spirit and experienced effectiveness in making the most of the coming historic victory with New Deal-sized Republican Congressional majorities.

Grassroots patriots also need to take the battle to the enablers. Publicly challenge and hold accountable the Obama corporate cronies funding the Obama campaign in return for taxpayer funded payoffs. Locally challenge and hold accountable the brain dead Obamanista supporters who so fundamentally misunderstand the roots of American prosperity that they would vote for a Marxist takeover that would mean the decline and fall of America.

Most fundamentally, blame the entire Democrat party for Obama and what he is doing to America. Don't let your friends, neighbors and relatives fall for shysters claiming that they are different from Obama and the other Democrats. If they are different, let them run as independents or Republicans, and be part of the solution rather than part of the gravely threatening problem.

Sir Alex Ferguson claims football has sold soul to TV 'devil'

2011-09-26T14:24:00.000-07:00

Sir Alex Ferguson has accused football of selling its soul to television and claimed that broadcasters do not pay enough money given the amount of control they exert over the game.

The Manchester United manager used his first in-depth BBC interview for almost a decade to berate the corrosive influence of television on the fixture list, despite the hundreds of millions of pounds it contributes to Manchester United's bottom line and its centrality to the business plan of the club's controversial owners.

"When you shake hands with the devil you have to pay the price. Television is God at the moment," said Ferguson, who agreed that broadcasters had "too much power". "It shows itself quite clearly because when you see the fixture lists come out now, they can pick and choose whenever they want the top teams on television," he added.

"You get some ridiculous situations when you're playing on Wednesday night in Europe and then at lunchtime the following Saturday. You ask any manager if they would pick that themselves and there'd be absolutely no chance."

Ferguson also said that broadcasters should pay more for the rights to live football, given the Premier League sold its product to more than 200 countries. "When you think of that I don't think we get enough money," he said.

The Premier League secured around £3.5bn from its most recent round of television deals, which run until the end of next season. About £2.1bn was generated from domestic rights sales, including about £1.8bn for live rights from BSkyB and ESPN, and £1.4bn from overseas broadcasters.

BSkyB refused to comment on Ferguson's observations but sports broadcasting insiders pointed out that Ferguson's views did not reflect the fact that each club must be shown live a minimum of 10 times and a maximum of 26, nor that other factors affected the scheduling of matches. They include policing issues and the ongoing tussle over the fixture calendar between domestic football bodies, Uefa and Fifa.

"Sir Alex's comments always have to be taken seriously – he is a very wise and experienced football man," Brian Barwick, a former FA chief executive and controller of sport at ITV, told the BBC.

"But on this one, I do think Manchester United have almost had a lion's share of TV revenue over a period of time and it has helped build a fantastic stadium in Old Trafford and helped build Sir Alex's teams with star players." Others pointed to the explosion in broadcasting income over the past two decades and the degree to which it drives Manchester United's commercial strategy, which relies on international TV exposure to drive its global sponsorship strategy.

Under the Premier League's distribution formula, which includes an equal share plus a merit payment and facility fees depending on the number of times each club is shown, Manchester United earned £60.4m from domestic TV last season.

The club's most recent financial results, to the year ending June 2011, showed that media income amounted to the club's biggest revenue stream, bringing in £119.4m. Commercial income, increasingly driven by overseas exposure on TV, rose to £103.4m from £81.4m the previous year.

The global reach afforded to the club by TV has been claimed as a major driver behind the plan to float a minority stake in Manchester United on the Singapore stock exchange.

The Football Supporters' Federation backed Ferguson's stance, albeit for different reasons. "The contract with Sky and ESPN ought to leave more control with the Premier League over the fixture calendar," said its chairman, Malcolm Clarke. "They should try and minimise the disruption to the number of matches being played on Saturday at 3pm. And they should be trying to minimise the number of long journeys for supporters on a Monday night.

"If you gave the Premier League more control, it might reduce the value of the rights in the marketplace but that should be a price football is prepared to pay."

Despite Ferguson's comments, there is no suggestion that the Glazers are planning to try to break away from the Premier League's collective selling model in order to maximise revenues.

In contrast to Spain, where the big two clubs do their own deals with television companies, the Premier League's income is shared out on a more equitable basis. Real Madrid recorded £129.9m in media revenues and Barcelona £145.8m, according to to the 2011 Deloitte Money League. United were the Premier League's highest earners last year, with and Blackpool the lowest with £39.1m.

The Glazers are believed to be convinced of the merits of the collective model but are determined to better exploit the limited rights that clubs have within their control by signing deals with international telecom and media companies.

In remarks that are likely to come as little surprise to those who have been on the receiving end of the Scot's famously fiery temper, David Beckham and Paul Ince included, Ferguson also admitted in the same interview: "I'm a confrontational character. I don't like people arguing back with me. I maybe have a short fuse."

USC Football: Sun Devils Scorch Trojans 43-22 | Neon Tommy

2011-09-26T08:55:00.000-07:00

USC Football: Sun Devils Scorch Trojans 43-22 | Neon Tommy

Rick Perry Is Right on In-State Tuition for Immigrants in Texas

2011-09-23T14:51:00.001-07:00

A Texas law supported by Republican presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry to provide in-state tuition for children of illegal immigrants when they attend college has gotten a lot of attention recently. It was the primary focus of several heated exchanges at last night’s debate and was widely criticized on Twitter as well, but Perry’s opponents and the media are giving an inaccurate picture of the law and its effects.

First of all, here’s a review of what the law actually entails.

Texas law permits a child who has lived in the state of Texas for at least three years and graduated from a state high school to qualify for in-state tuition at a Texas college or university, on the condition that the child agrees to pursue full citizenship.

Now let’s look at how many students qualified under this rule.

According to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, in FY2010, 16,476 students qualified for in-state tuition under TEC 54.052(a)(3), the Texas statue governing this program. That number represents only one percent of total enrollment in Texas public universities; community, technical, and state colleges; and public health-related institutions.

Only one-percent. One-percent. The likes of Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and others would have you believe it was a program run amok where these students were defrauding a system, unfairly taking advantage of this status, and ruining higher education for every other Texan. In a state with more than a million students in public institutions of higher learning, 16,476 students is a drop in the bucket.

Despite what you may be lead to believe, this was not a highly partisan bill that narrowly squeaked by on a tight party-line vote in the Texas legislature. In fact, only four legislators voted against the measure. The national media, and those politicians from outside the state of Texas may be quick to criticize this law and label it as extremist, but in reality it’s not.

This program makes a difference by offering these kids a helping hand to a quality education they may not receive otherwise. It does not destroy the ability of other Texas to get into school. In the end, it doesn’t even make a significant impact on the budgets of these colleges and universities. For instance, the Permanent University Fund that supports the flagship universities in Texas gets a substantial portion of its money from oil. They own an immense amount of land in West Texas and that land happens to be rich in black gold, pumping reliable dollars into the coffers of these schools. Tuition only makes up about a quarter of their overall funding.

These students have lived in Texas, some the required three years, some nearly their entire lives. As part of this program students must have graduated from a Texas high school, most likely a public one, paid for in part by the state. Shouldn’t they have the chance to receive the same services at the rate that other students who graduated from a Texas high school do?

These children should not be punished for the illegal acts of their parents. Many families risk life and limb to get to America so their children can have the opportunity to attend college and achieve the American dream.

It may not be true in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, or Minnesota, but in Texas there are a high number of Hispanic immigrants, some of whom are illegal. The means by which they’re allowed to slip past a border all but neglected by the federal government is for another conversation, but the fact remains that they are here and serve as valued members of the community, and are an integral part of the Texas culture. Hispanics are not political pawns to be thrown around by candidates seeking to score cheap political points by demagoguing an entire race.

Besides the fact that Republicans will be shut out of power for ages to come if they alienate Hispanics, it’s entirely inappropriate and un-American to punish the children of immigrants who may have fled their dysfunctional, failing, or dangerous homeland for a better life here in America. These are students who only get this in-state tuition rate if they commit to becoming legal citizens. Their tuition isn’t waived altogether, it’s just provided at the rate that every other Texas resident pays.

Now I’m not lobbying for blanket amnesty, and neither was Rick Perry – he’s on record opposing the federal DREAM Act – but the picture of this legislation painted by his opponents in this election is entirely inaccurate. I’m sure someone from the Romney camp will read this and use his favorite line these days, “nice try,” but the statistics show this for what it truly is, a program that does not punish these students, these future citizens, whose parents came to this country illegally. Instead it helps them become educated, productive citizens of these United States.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

Trojans start to feel the rush

2011-09-19T07:46:00.001-07:00

LOS ANGELES -- It’s amazing how little we’ve learned about this USC football team through the first three games.

Matt Barkley and Robert Woods are good. The early-season schedule, not so much.

This coaching staff and USC’s collective fandom sit and hope this team grows into a personality. It has an offensive identity -- those two guys. “Barkley to Woods” figures to be the phrase of 2011, maybe the only memorable connection when it’s all said and done.

But there is another group on this team that has the potential to take over games, to help carry this team back from the morass of mediocrity to a potentially dominant position in college football again. Thus far, we’ve only seen glimpses and furtive glances.

Some of the most talented guys on this roster teased us again in Saturday’s close-but-not-quite-dominant 38-17 win over Syracuse. The USC defensive line isn’t what it should be yet, but it’s getting close. It has seven days before it absolutely has to arrive or this season might unravel slowly, the way it did a year ago.

“I’m waiting to see it. I really am,” said defensive coordinator Ed Orgeron. “It hasn’t happened yet. We’ve shown spurts, but obviously we’ve got a lot of ball left to play.”

Syracuse quarterback Ryan Nassib is an efficient guy and he was beginning to get comfortable Saturday, far more at-home than a quarterback from a rebuilding program ever should look playing in the Coliseum -- a place that once had the power to unnerve. Nassib was so rattled, he completed all 11 of his passes in the first quarter.

By the third, it looked as if he and his Orange teammates were actually starting to believe they could do what five of the previous 12 USC opponents had done here: win.

Then things started to cave in.

Syracuse had gotten to within 24-10 and Nassib hit Nick Provo on a 33-yard strike to push the ball all the way to USC’s 37-yard line. USC needed somebody to do something big, somebody to knock Nassib out of his rhythm and get the message through that this program may be down, but it still can land a punch.

Nassib dropped back on third-and-eight and was enveloped in the collective embrace of Nick Perry, Shane Horton and DaJohn Harris, the gang-sack ending a drive that had started with so much promise. Syracuse was backed up on its next drive and Wes Horton hit Nassib this time, dropping him at the Syracuse 10. The Trojans had only three sacks, but two of them were at that pivotal juncture in the third quarter.

“We just kept coming,” Harris said.

Teams have tended to avoid these guys. The USC defense is seeing a lot of quick drops and play-action plays, opponents hoping to offset the Trojans’ big athletes by putting the heat on the secondary. But they should have opportunities in the upcoming week. The Trojans figure to get their toughest test yet at Arizona State, where Brock Osweiler has thrown for an average of 290 yards per game. But he’s also 6 feet 8, 240 pounds and will take his time in the pocket looking for deep hits in Dennis Erickson’s offense.

Now, would be as good a time as any for the USC defensive front to prove it’s as good as the recruiting services claimed. Perry might be the most impressive athlete on USC’s team, Devon Kennard was a highly decorated recruit who has bounced between linebacker and defensive end and has yet to leave a permanent mark. Harris is turning into a force on the interior. Christian Tupou is the most experienced player in the group.

“Every game, we’re going to come out here and be dominant out here,” Perry said. “That’s going to be key in some of these big games.”

Orgeron keeps waiting. He challenges these guys during position group meetings. But being a defensive end is kind of like being a closer in baseball. People don’t want to hear about the details. You either got the save or you didn’t. You either got the sack or you didn’t.

“His big emphasis is, we’ve got all the talent in the world in the D-line room, but we’ve got to show it on Saturdays,” Kennard said. “The hype doesn’t matter, what we could be or what we can be. We’ve got to put it on film.”

The man who would be veep

2011-09-19T07:44:00.000-07:00

The battle for the Republican presidential nomination is just heating up. But the choice of running mate is as good as settled, at least if the Beltway buzz is to be believed.

Many party insiders feel that the attractions of Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) for the second spot on the ticket are irresistible.

“Right now, he is head and shouders above everybody else,” Florida-based GOP strategist Rick Wilson told The Hill. (Wilson supported Rubio during his 2010 Senate bid, but did not work for the campaign.)

Garlands have been hurled Rubio’s way with conspicuous frequency in the past few weeks.

“Rubio has the most important ingredient of any leader: vision,” conservative columnist Cal Thomas wrote.

Former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen last week contrasted the “depressing” performance of the Republican presidential candidates on foreign policy with that of Rubio. The Floridian recently “stepped forward to do what the other candidates should have: lay out a clear foreign policy vision,” Thiessen wrote on his Washington Post blog.

Thiessen and Thomas were reacting to two major speeches.

The first came late last month at the Ronald Reagan Library in California. There, Rubio laid out a worldview that sounded strikingly magnanimous.

“Conservatism is not about leaving people behind,” he said. “Conservatism is about empowering people to catch up, to give them the tools at their disposal that make it possible for them to access all the hope, all the promise, all the opportunity that America offers. And our programs to help them should reflect that.”

Rubio turned his attention to foreign policy last Tuesday, with an address at the Jesse Helms Center in North Carolina. Though the speech assailed the Obama administration, it also put a wide stretch of water between Rubio and the GOP’s paleoconservative wing.

“If we refuse to play our rightful role and shrink from the world, America and the entire world will pay a terrible price,” he insisted.

Rubio seemingly ruled out being part of a presidential ticket next year when, during an appearance on “Meet the Press” in May, he told host David Gregory: “I won’t consider it. I don’t want to be the vice president of the United States.”

Still, whether those denials of interest would remain as firm if he were asked to be on the ticket is an open question. Would he really turn down such a request, which would surely be accompanied by beseechings that he had a duty to help his party?

“It would be difficult to say no, especially if someone made the argument that you could be decisive in a number of key states,” said Wilson.

Rubio is a gifted orator. The narrative of his life, rising as the son of hardworking immigrants, resonates widely. Superficially — but importantly — he is telegenic, young, has a discernible sense of humor and a taste in music that extends to rap and hip-hop.

“He has the quality of a young, suburban father,” conservative commentator and National Review blogger Reihan Salam told The Hill. “There are many ways in which he appears very ‘normal.’”

The senator’s mainstream appeal has led to him becoming a talking point far beyond the usual Washington-centric forums. His name popped up out of the blue earlier this month on the popular podcast by sports journalist Bill Simmons, when a guest abruptly announced, “Rubio is a rock-solid lock [for a vice-presidential nomination]. You can take that to Vegas. He’s 1-5.”

Rubio’s ethnicity is, and will continue to be, a major focus. For a party that has struggled to win minority support — and is particularly concerned about its failure to gain traction with the fast-growing Hispanic population — Rubio has a potent appeal.

GOP strategist and Univision analyst Hector Barajas notes the mere fact that Rubio can speak English and Spanish with equal fluency is a big advantage. More broadly, he added, the senator “is someone who can have a kinda ‘family conversation’ with the Latino community.”

A 2012 ticket that included Rubio as the running mate “ would be good for our community and good for our party,” Barajas said.

The relationship between Rubio and the Hispanic community is not without complications, however. For a start, Cuban-Americans have tended to be somewhat discrete from the broader Hispanic population, and have traditionally skewed heavily Republican. On that basis alone, Rubio’s appeal to centrist or left-leaning Hispanics might be more muted than some expect.

Rubio has also cleaved to positions on illegal immigration that are little different from most of his Republican comrades — and are antithetical to advocates within the Hispanic community. He opposed the DREAM Act, which would allow illegal immigrants who had come to the United States as minors to become legal residents, subject to a number of conditions.

University of South Florida professor Seth McKee draws an intriguing parallel regarding the tension between Rubio’s identity and his political positions.

“It’s like the way Sarah Palin did not really have strong appeal to women, except for the fact that she was a woman. Marco Rubio does not have a strong natural appeal to Hispanics, except for the fact that he is Hispanic,” he said.

Salam, who admires Rubio in general, admitted that “I wouldn’t say that the Democrats would have no arrows in their quiver if it came to attacking a ticket that Rubio was on.” The senator’s stated desire to reform Social Security by raising the retirement age might be one vulnerability, he added.

Still, in a party that is not exactly awash with rising stars, Rubio shines brightly. Few people doubt that he has national ambitions, whatever his protestations to the contrary.

According to University of South Florida professor Susan MacManus, the possibility of him being the Number Two on a 2012 presidential ticket is “the buzz that has been circulating in Florida for quite some time.”

There are two schools of thought on his willingness to push himself for that role, overtly or covertly, she said.

On the one hand, he seems such an attractive candidate that he need not hurry onto the very biggest stage. He could bide his time.

On the other, “if he really feels the party will win next year, that changes the calculation.”

The party might well feel its chances of victory are boosted by having the senator on the ticket.

For the man himself, the lure of becoming Vice President Rubio might be too enticing to resist — even if that position would still be one step away from the ultimate destination that many of his supporters predict.

Source:
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/182219-marco-rubio-the-man-who-would-be-veep

Fight On

2011-09-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman Is Back Out From Under His Desk - He’s still a fool and a liar, though.

2011-09-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

The New York Times fully endorses Paul Krugman’s disgusting 9/11 column, since they haven’t fired him for writing it. A great number of their readers did not endorse it, so Krugman spent a few days hiding under his desk, with comments for both his initial screed and a subsequent expansion of his tinfoil-hat ravings turned off. Today he crawled back out to pen a little screed about how Republicans want everyone to be “free to die.”

What got Krugman thinking about this important subject was an exchange during the GOP presidential debate in Tampa:

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”

And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”

Never forget that Paul Krugman is a liar, in addition to being a coward. The crowd did not “erupt with cheers and shouts of yeah!” when Wolf Blitzer said that. One or two people threw out a rowdy “Yeah!” It’s hard to tell if it’s the same person shouting it twice, so let’s just be charitable to the New York Times’ pet propagandist and say two.

Ron Paul’s answer to Wolf Blitzer’s question, transcribed precisely, was “No.”

What made the crowd erupt in cheers was Paul saying, “That’s what freedom is about: taking your own risk.” Granted Paul Krugman responds to such ideas by blinking in numb incomprehension, and maybe sputtering something about how it would be nice if aliens attacked the Earth so we could have more infrastructure spending without public opposition, but I assume he’s still capable of understanding the actual words.

They applauded wildly again when Paul said that “we never turned anybody away from the hospital” during his medical practice days. He went on to make another point that a statist flatliner like Krugman can never understand, about the difference between a healthy and free society providing charitable emergency care for the truly needy, and a dead-end socialist bureaucracy taking over the entire medical industry – a process with results that Krugman famously lied about in August 2009 by penning this immortal line:

In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.

This line became a favorite chew toy of the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, who never fails to mention it when reporting the latest horror story from the world of British socialized medicine. Quite a few of them involve dead people, so I guess their system has made them “free to die,” eh, Krugman?

Now, let’s be clear: Paul Krugman is a slow-witted man living inside a hermetically sealed bubble of information, but it’s impossible that he didn’t know about the failures of British socialized medicine. He wasn’t quibbling about a story here or there – he made a blanket declaration that all of them are false.

Likewise, there is no way Krugman could have watched the GOP debate last Monday night, or read an accurate transcript of it, and honestly come up with the column he published today. Don’t believe me? Watch it for yourself:

Krugman’s entire column proceeds from his lie about the Blitzer-Paul exchange, and the false premise that people who resist totalitarian socialism are heartless monsters who want the sick and needy to drop dead.

Given the agreed-upon desirability of protecting citizens against the worst, the question then became one of costs and benefits — and health care was one of those areas where even conservatives used to be willing to accept government intervention in the name of compassion, given the clear evidence that covering the uninsured would not, in fact, cost very much money. As many observers have pointed out, the Obama health care plan was largely based on past Republican plans, and is virtually identical to Mitt Romney’s health reform in Massachusetts.

Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.

And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

In the reality Krugman desperately wants you to forget about, so his arguments make some kind of minimal sense, both RomneyCare and ObamaCare have wiped out jobs, driven up health care costs, and reduced the number of people with health insurance.

And ObamaCare has only just gotten started destroying private insurance plans. This process will eventually force most Americans into the kind of government-run socialist program Krugman favors, but that is emphatically not how the program was sold to Americans. Not only that, but we were fed nonsense about how ObamaCare would cost the taxpayers very little, but if we’re all forced into the public exchanges, its cost will blow our already horrific national debt into the stratosphere. In other words, ObamaCare was a lie. That’s probably why a liar like Krugman would be so comfortable with it.

I call upon the editors of the New York Times to compel Krugman to write an apology and correct the factual inaccuracies in his column. Then their ombudsman should write a detailed explanation for why Krugman was allowed to publish such an obvious falsehood in the first place. If they’re not going to fire this tedious slander artist and fraud, they should assign editors to review what he writes, before he does any more damage to what remains of the Grey Lady’s reputation.

Meanwhile, I'm really looking forward to Wolf Blitzer going after Barack Obama like a prosecutor during the general election, and barking "Who pays?" at him during a question about ObamaCare, or anything else.

The president's own economic words are coming back to haunt him.

2011-09-16T10:46:00.001-07:00

The Obama Promise: Then and Now
The president's own economic words are coming back to haunt him.
By STEPHEN MOORE

Barack Obama now faces perhaps his most politically crippling deficit of all: a credibility deficit.

That observation is reflected in the latest Bloomberg poll, which finds that on the heels of his big jobs speech last Thursday night, more than half of Americans (51%) do not believe the president's claim that this latest $447 billion spend-and-tax-or-borrow scheme will create new jobs.

"As the economy has gotten worse, people have stopped listening to Obama and his speeches are no longer an asset, they're a liability," concludes Kellyanne Conway, president of the Polling Company. That is because the gulf between three years of rhetoric and reality is so gigantic.
Related Video

WSJ Editorial board member Steve Moore on President Obama's plan to pay for temporary tax cuts by hiking income and business taxes over the long haul.

It is hard to make a persuasive case for a $447 billion economic stimulus plan that looks and sounds so much like the $830 billion plan that Americans were sold two-and-a-half years ago. That first plan didn't "create or save" the 3.5 million jobs the White House promised, and most Americans don't agree with Vice President Biden that it worked beyond his "wildest dreams." Tell that to the 14 million Americans—two million more than when all the spending and borrowing began—who are still out of work, or the tens of millions who do have jobs but have seen their income drop in the last two years.

American voters can't conceive of how $447 billion of more debt and spending will create jobs when the last three years have already given us $4 trillion of new debt with no jobs. What is even harder to believe is the president's assurance that the new American Jobs Act "will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for." How can this plan be paid for when the first, $830 billion, plan has never been paid for?

While running for president Mr. Obama promised "pay as you go budgeting," and in February 2009 during his "fiscal responsibility summit" he sounded like Ronald Reagan when he said that "this is the rule that families across this country follow every single day, and there's no reason why their government shouldn't do the same." But the Obama government isn't doing the same. It is doing the opposite.

Here's another Obama promise that sounds like a whopper today. In 2008 he pledged he would "go through our federal budget—page by page, line by line—eliminating those programs we don't need, and insisting that those we do operate in a sensible cost-effective way." That hasn't happened.

In the wake of the lousy economic news, Mr. Obama, who promised a new era of "accountability," has blamed the ongoing jobs recession on "a run of bad luck." Who knew there would be a tsunami in Japan, disruptions in the oil supply from the Mideast—when has that ever happened before?—and so many other job-killing events beyond the president's control?
stevemoore0916
stevemoore0916
Getty Images

The president touts his latest economic plan.

The green jobs revolution we were expecting to put America back to work is also browning out. A new Department of Energy study finds that between 2007 and 2010, clean-energy subsidies more than doubled. But after billions of taxpayer handouts have been pumped year after year into solar and wind power, these two industries supply 2.4% of America's electricity.

Mr. Obama says he wants to make America less dependent on foreign oil, but this week he called again for raising taxes on domestic oil and gas production. He said last year that he believes America is "running out of places to drill" even though in the last five years new discoveries of oil and natural gas have occurred in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Dakota, Texas, Montana and Colorado—causing a near doubling in U.S. recoverable reserves.

Mr. Obama said in his speech on Thursday that health-care costs are a major contributor to the debt and need to be reined in. He neglected to mention what voters surely remember, which is that last year Mr. Obama signed a health-care law that adds at least 30 million more Americans to Medicaid—the program Mr. Obama now says is the problem. During the debate over ObamaCare the White House insisted that the fees in the plan for not purchasing health insurance were not a tax. But arguing before the courts on the constitutionality of the law, the White House now says these are taxes. Which is it?

Mr. Obama says he has been one of the most constantly attacked presidents in history and he is probably right about that. But his attackers in the conservative movement aren't likely to be his undoing. His most damning persecutors are his own words and promises. The problem for President Obama is that fewer voters are listening to him. There's no blaming George W. Bush for that.

Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

Perry and the Profs - He picked the right fight.

2011-09-15T10:52:00.000-07:00

September 19, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 01

If you want a glimpse of the way Rick Perry operates as an executive and a politician, consider the issue of higher education reform in Texas, which no one in Texas knew was an issue until Perry decided to make it one.

In his 30-year public career, Perry—how to put this delicately?—has shown no sign of being tortured by a gnawing intellectual curiosity. “He’s not the sort of person you’ll find reading The Wealth of Nations for the seventh time,” said Brooke Rollins, formerly Perry’s policy director and now president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a free-market research group closely allied with Perry. At Texas A&M he majored in animal science and escaped with a grade point average a bit over 2.0. (Perry’s A&M transcript was leaked last month to the left-wing blog Huffington Post by “a source in Texas,” presumably not his mom. How his GPA compares with Barack Obama’s is unknown, since no one in higher education has thought to leak Obama’s transcript to a right-wing blog.)

Perry expends his considerable intelligence instead on using political power and, what amounts to the same thing, picking fights with his political adversaries. When Rollins came to Perry in 2007 with a radical and comprehensive proposal to overhaul higher education in the state, Rollins says the governor quickly understood the potential of the issue, not only politically but on its merits. The state operates more than 100 colleges, universities, technical schools, and two-year community colleges, organized into six separate systems. As in other states, public higher education in Texas is scattered, expensive, poorly monitored, and top heavy with administrators, even as it subjects students to often large annual tuition increases without a compensatory increase in educational quality.

Perry’s first poke at this sclerotic establishment came early in his first term. He suggested converting the money that the state gives to public colleges and universities into individual grants handed straight to students. Money is power, and Perry’s idea was to place the power in the hands of “consumers,” as he put it, rather than the administrators, to increase competition among schools and thereby lower costs and increase quality. “Young fertile minds [should be] empowered,” he said at the time, “to pursue their dreams regardless of family income, the color of their skin, or the sound of their last name.”

The higher ed establishment, led by regents of the University of Texas system, rebelled, and the legislature, well-wired with the system’s allies, agreed, and the proposal died. But Perry continued to poke. College graduation rates in Texas are unusually low, and the gaps among whites, blacks, and Hispanics are unusually high. Nationwide 38 percent of American adults (age 25-64) have a post-secondary degree; in Texas the figure is 31 percent. So Perry proposed “Outcomes-based Funding,” tying the amount of aid a school receives to the number of students it graduates. To keep a school from lowering its standards to increase its graduation rates, he suggested giving an exit exam to all students receiving a B.A. Students wouldn’t have to pass the exam to get their degree, but the information yielded by such a test—how much learning is going on around here?—would be useful, mostly to reformers. The proposal was seen, correctly, as a threat to the status quo, which has so far successfully fought it off.

The proposals Rollins brought to Perry in 2007 turned on the same themes of—apologizing in advance for the buzzwords—accountability and transparency: collecting information about how much students learn and how well schools function, and holding the schools responsible for the results. “His priority has been putting students back into the driver’s seat,” Rollins said. Perry said he hoped to apply the cost-benefit logic of business to public higher education. He incorporated Rollins’s ideas into a package of reforms and called a “higher education summit” to build support.

The reforms attacked the establishment from multiple angles. They would require schools to expand their websites to make vast amounts of new information available to students. For the first time, professors would be required to post course syllabi online. To suss out slackers among the faculty, schools would post every teacher’s salary and benefits along with the average number of students and course hours they taught every year. A summary of student evaluations would be posted too, and the average number of As and Bs professors handed out, to guard against grade inflation. Before choosing a particular school or enrolling in a major, students would be given a list of the specific skills or knowledge that they could expect to learn, as well as the average starting salaries of students who had graduated from a similar course of study.

Perry also suggested separating teaching budgets from research budgets, as a way of encouraging teachers to teach and researchers to do research. Tenure would be granted only to teachers who spent a large majority of their time teaching; a defined percentage of tenure jobs would go to researchers, who would concentrate on pure research. A system of cash awards and other incentives would compensate professors who successfully taught a large number of students.

Any businessman in a profit-seeking enterprise would see ideas like “pay for performance” as unremarkable, but they overwhelm the delicate sensibilities of people who have spent their professional lives on campus, where the word “nonprofit” is meant to act as a firewall against the unpleasantness of commercial life. “Texas Governor Treats Colleges Like Businesses,” headlined the Chronicle of Higher Education—a sentence sure to induce aneurysms in faculty lounges from El Paso to Galveston. The outrage was deafening, especially when university regents began acting on the recommendations. The Texas A&M system, for example, which includes a dozen schools, posted a spreadsheet on its website evaluating teacher performance on a cost-benefit basis.

“Very simplistic and potentially very dangerous,” an official of the American Association of University Professors said. “This is . . . simplistic,” said the dean of faculties at A&M. “Simplistic,” said the Houston Chronicle. A group of former regents and wealthy school boosters organized a pressure group to oppose -Perry’s reforms. The group hired Karen Hughes, a close aide to the second President Bush, as press spokesman. The rage at Perry from within the establishment has taken many forms: You think it’s easy stealing someone’s college transcript?

The protests might have been more effective except that Perry, for the last decade, has been seeding Texas higher education with like-minded reformers (cronies too). By 2009 he had appointed every regent in the state. The chancellor of A&M who issued the cost-benefit report, for example, was a former chief of staff of the governor. At least three campus presidents have been pressured to resign in recent years, to make way for Perry appointees—all Republican businessmen. A particularly popular (and vocal) vice president of student affairs at the University of Texas was removed and replaced by . . . a retired Marine Corps general.

The appointees weren’t as pliant as Perry might have wished. The implementation of the reforms has been difficult and at times dilatory. Perry barrels on. In his state of the state address this spring, he urged administrators to develop a four-year bachelor’s degree that would cost less than $10,000 “including textbooks.” The discount degree, he said, would be a “bold, Texas-style solution” to the problem of rapidly rising tuition. (The average in-state cost of a four-year degree in Texas, including books, is roughly $30,000.) After the goal was declared impossible by Perry’s critics, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board published a plan to lower costs dramatically: greater use of online classes and “open-source” course materials, accelerated or staggered student schedules, fuller integration of four- and two-year colleges, and more.

Perry’s admirers praise his sure-footedness—his ability to sense cultural trends before others do and turn them to his political advantage. He was the first national politician to ally himself to the Tea Party movement in 2009, a move that’s just now paying off. He caught the mounting anxiety among middle-income parents about college costs early on. Most American parents now say that a college degree will be essential for their children’s future success; at the same time, according to a new Pew Foundation poll, only 22 percent of Americans believe that most people can afford to send their kids to college. And 57 percent describe the quality of American higher education as “only fair” or “poor.” To address this anxiety Perry’s opponents offer more government subsidies, which in turn provide an incentive for schools to raise their prices—an attempt to douse the fire with gasoline. Perry’s ideas are cheaper, more comprehensive, more imaginative, and more likely to work.

And they have a good chance of being put into action. In late August, Perry scored another significant, if partial, victory. The University of Texas regents approved an “action plan” proposed by the system’s chancellor, who isn’t a Perry appointee. The plan is a compromise, but it incorporates many of Perry’s ideas, including some of the most radical, such as “pay for performance” and “learning contracts” between schools and their students. Amazingly, the plan has won support from both the right (Brooke Rollins’s Texas Public Policy Foundation) and left (Karen Hughes’s group).

Reforms like these would have been unthinkable 10 years ago, before Perry picked up his stick and started poking the system until it had to respond. It’s been a remarkable display of political entrepreneurship: Create an issue, define it on your terms, cultivate public support, and your opponents, who never saw it coming, will have to go along, even if only partway—at first.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author, most recently, of Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College.

Economy should render Obama speechless

2011-09-15T09:54:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON — In societies governed by persuasion, politics is mostly talk, so liberals’ impoverishment of their vocabulary matters.

Having damaged liberalism’s reputation, they call themselves progressives. Having made the federal government’s pretensions absurd, they have resurrected the supposed synonym “federal family.” Having made federal spending suspect, they advocate “investments” — for “job creation,” a euphemism for stimulus, another word they have made toxic.

Barack Obama, a pitilessly rhetorical president, continues to grab the nation by its lapels but the nation is no longer listening. This matters because ominous portents are multiplying.

Bank of America, which reported an $8.8 billion loss last quarter, plans 30,000 layoffs out of a work force of nearly 300,000. The Postal Service hopes to shed 120,000 of its 653,000 jobs (down from almost 900,000 a decade ago). Such churning of the labor market would free people for new, more productive jobs — except that to reduce unemployment, the economy needs a 3 percent growth rate, triple today’s rate.

Consumers of modest means are so strapped that Wal-Mart is reviving layaway purchases for Christmas. The Wall Street Journal reports that Procter & Gamble, which claims to have at least one product in 98 percent of American households, is putting new emphasis on lower-priced products for low-income shoppers.

During the debt-ceiling debate, The New York Times [NYT], liberalism’s bulletin board, was aghast that Republicans risked causing the nation to default on its debt. Now two Times columnists endorse slow-motion default through inflation: The Federal Reserve should have “the deliberate goal of generating higher inflation to help alleviate debt problems” (Paul Krugman) and “sometimes we need inflation, and now is such a time” (Floyd Norris).

For two years, there has been one constant: As events have refuted the Obama administration’s certitudes, it has retained its insufferable knowingness. It knew that the stimulus would hold unemployment below 8 percent. Oops. Unemployment has been at least 9 percent in 26 of the 30 months since the stimulus was passed. Michael Boskin of Stanford says that even if one charitably accepts the administration’s self-serving estimate of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus, each job cost $280,000 — five times America’s median pay.

The economic policy the “federal family” should adopt can be expressed in five one-syllable words: Get. Out. Of. The. Way.

Instead, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department has become a venture capital firm for crony capitalism and costly flops at creating “green jobs,” praises the policy of essentially banishing the incandescent light bulb as “taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”

Better to let the experts in his department and the rest of the federal family waste other people’s money.

Talk back at georgewill@washpost.com.

USC Football 2011: Trojans Answer Many Questions vs. Utah Utes in Week 2

2011-09-14T14:18:00.000-07:00

Harry How/Getty Images
Welcome to the Pac-12, Utah. Although outmanned, you played hard and kept the first Pac-12 conference game close while the USC defense preserved a 23-14 win for the Trojans.

Last week we discussed the 10 questions for USC to answer in this game. Many were answered, but there is work to be done for the Trojans to have the successful season desired.

After the game in a national TV interview, USC coach Lane Kiffin congratulated the Utah Utes for playing very well and expressed his praise for the Trojans players. Kiffin told reporters at the post-game press conference, “I'm excited to finish this way. The energy on the sideline and energy on the field brings a team together.” Here is his post game interview courtesy of SCPlaybook.com.

Game Summary

Utah stayed in this game when the Trojans offense uncharacteristically coughed up three turnovers in the red zone. Two fumbles by freshman RB D.J. Morgan and TE Xavier Grimble resulted in all 14 points for the Utes.

Meanwhile, the USC defense held Utah to 319 total yards with only 81 yards rushing. Time and again, the Trojan defense stopped the Utes. This defense is much better than the 2010 USC defense ranked 83rd nationally.

Here is the USC-Utah final score for anyone still confused. The Trojans gained 416 yards with a balanced offense with QB Matt Barkley’s 264 yards passing (20 of 32) and 152 yards rushing on 39 attempts. USC could have easily scored another 21 points without the turnovers.

Senior RB Marc Tyler made a huge impact on the running game with 113 yards on 24 carries and one TD. Sophomore WR Robert Woods had a “quiet” eight receptions and 112 yards, but the ball was spread to six other receivers for 12 receptions and 151 yards.

Special teams blocked the Utah game tying FG attempt and CB Torin Harris ran it back for a TD.

Contrary to last season, the Trojans held on in the fourth quarter of a tight game for the second week in a row.

Here is game report card from ESPN’s Pedro Moura and excellent video highlights courtesy of T-Wire.

Answers to Questions

USC QB Matt Barkley
1. Will the Offensive Line open holes and give Barkley more time to pass down field?

Yes.

Utah has a very good front seven. The USC OL played better than expected giving QB Matt Barkley time to throw and opening holes for the running game. LG Martin Coleman made his first start and did well. However he left in the second quarter and Jeremy Galten relieved him.

2. Will more receivers get involved in the passing game?

Yes.

Lane Kiffin was criticized somewhat unfairly for the play calling in the second half of the Minnesota game. He realized that WR Robert Woods would be covered differently and there were eleven pass completions to seven different receivers in the second half. Unfortunately there were also seven drops including four by freshmen TEs Randall Telfer and Xavier Grimble. Together with penalties at the wrong time, those drops stalled USC drives and the USC offense looked as bad in this half as they looked good in the first half.

USC RB Marc Tyler ran for 113 yards on 24 carries in his first 2011 game against Utah The Trojans had seven receivers catch passes in the Utah game. However, both Grimble and Telfer had excellent games except for a fumble turnover by Grimble. Grimble was the second leading pass receiver with five receptions for 65 yards and one TD. Telfer had two receptions for 28 yards. Kiffin found a weakness in the Utes coverage and exploited it. Woods was the leading pass receiver again but with less than half the pass receptions in this game.

3. Will a running game be established?

Yes.

The experience and power of senior Marc Tyler made a big difference this week. While most of his runs were in the three to five yards range (averaging 4.7), he maintained positive yardage keeping drives alive. That was very important against the very tough Utah front four.

At the post-game press conference, Marc Tyler told reporters, “I just feel good. This is something I dreamed about.”

USC OT Matt Kalil blocks Utah FG to save game The balanced running and passing attack made the USC offense more difficult to stop (except for turnovers and some penalties in the fourth quarter).

4. Will Penalties be reduced especially at key times?

Yes, partially.

The Trojans had six penalties for 54 yards. However, too many were at key times, however three penalties in the fourth quarter almost cost USC the game.

In a drive starting with 12:27 remaining and USC ahead 17-14, a Trojan WR lined up in an ineligible receiver position and this caused a 36 yard reception by TE Randall Telfer to be called back and the Trojans penalized five yards. The Trojans were forced to punt after the third down failed.

With 6:04 remaining WR Brandon Carswell committed an illegal block (due to a new rule) that resulted in 14-yard penalty and the Trojans were forced to punt after the long third down failed.

Utah got the ball back with 1:01 remaining and drove to the USC 39 yard line when the Trojans were penalized 15 yards for pass interference by Tony Burnett. Fortunately the FG attempt from the 24 yard line was blocked by Matt Kalil to save the game.

USC Freshman kicker Andrei Heidari congratulated after first USC FG, a 47-yarder

5. Will Special Teams get a chance to kick FGs?

Yes.

Freshman Andrei Heidari made the first points in Pac-12 history when he kicked a 47-yard FG. He also made a similar one that was negated by a penalty.

6. Will the Trojans continue to go for two extra points?

Not this game. USC didn’t need the boo-birds in this close game.

You might be surprised that there are more good football reasons to go for two points than kicking the extra point. The pros and cons of this issue are discussed here.

7. Will the Trojans get a positive turnover margin?

No.

USC DT DaJohn Harris sacks Utah QB Jordan Wynn This was the biggest disappointment in the game. USC forced Utah’s RB White to fumble in the first quarter and this led to the first Trojan TD, which was a good start.

However, Matt Barkley threw an interception in the red zone in the second quarter at the Utah 15. Then on USC’s next possession, RB D.J. Morgan fumbled at the Utah 16. The Utes put together a long drive and scored their first TD. Finally, TE Xavier Grimble fumbled in the third quarter and Utah scored quickly after a 51-yard run by Reggie Dunn on a reverse.

Things ended well with a blocked Utah FG and return by Torin Harris for a USC TD.

8. Will pass coverage be improved?

Yes, partially.

The Trojans played more man-to-man coverage and a very aggressive defense to contain the Utes. However, there were some pass interference calls and open receivers that could have been a problem if Utah QB Jordan Wynn had a stronger arm or was more accurate. Credit the USC pass rush for many of his problems.

9. Why did USC not make the right halftime adjustments and win the second half?

It will be difficult for the media and fans to criticize Lane Kiffin’s play calling in this game. If not for turnovers in the red zone, the Trojan offense and defense outplayed Utah for almost the entire game.

Monte Kiffin’s defense handled anything that Utah coach Norm Chow could muster except for one surprise reverse and a long drive. The Trojan offense was balanced and exploited the few Utah defensive weaknesses, but shot themselves in the foot with turnovers and a few untimely penalties.

As discussed in No. 2 above, Kiffin was unfairly criticized last week for not adjusting in the second half of the Minnesota game. The problem in that game was primarily dropped passes and untimely penalties, and the record shows that more receivers were involved contrary to some press reports. The running game was inconsistent due to many stops by Minnesota so the Trojans could not sustain a balanced attack.

10. Will more players participate in the game?

Yes, a few more.

Freshman MLB Lamar Dawson played in relief of Chris Galippo in two series and did well. There were four more players used than the first game for a total of 47.

Hopefully, the Syracuse game in Week 3 will give more Trojans an opportunity to play.

The USC-Utah game was viewed as a tipping point for the Trojans 2011 season. While there are certainly areas that need to continue to improve, it showed a team that is improving and has the potential to be successful this season with a 9-3 record or better.

The Trojans have a lot of inexperienced players since over half of the team are redshirt or true freshmen, but they should continue to improve as the season progresses.

USC's wild win over Utah kicks off new Pac 12 era in style

2011-09-11T00:24:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES -- Football is supposed to be a simple game.

Inches. That's what the movies will tell you football comes down to. Offense, defense and special teams. Most pundits will remind you each phase is worth a third of the game.

John Baxter was not a math major -- the USC special teams' coach has a physical education degree and a masters in higher education -- but he'll challenge you on both these points. It's a game not of inches, but yards. Special teams isn't a third but a fifth.

The fuzzy math might not make sense to some but on Saturday at the L.A. Coliseum, each were part of the equation as the Trojans beat Utah on a last second field goal block to win the first ever Pac-12 conference game 23-14.

"Special teams is one out of every five teams in football," Baxter said. "It's 20 percent of the game. Anybody that tells you it's a third of the game is crazy."

More on Utah-USC
Related links
Recap: USC survives Utah
Fischer: Scott not looking for expansion
USC: Postgame RapidReports | USC
More Pac-12 coverage with Bryan Fischer
Though Baxter's words might make sense to some, crazy and questionable calls were all over the place.

Down 17-14, Utah quarterback Jordan Wynn found DeVante Christopher for a 10 yard gain on 4th down with under a minute left to keep the Utes' hopes for a win or tie alive. Officials initially ruled him short as the crowd of 73, 821 celebrated.

Then the play was reviewed. First down.

As the crowd cheered fight on, the players came back out onto the field to play on.

Scrambling around on the next play, Wynn fired a pass in the direction of a wide receiver running a wheel route along the sidelines but former walk-on cornerback Tony Burnett was flagged for pass interference, putting the ball at the 24 yard line and 11 seconds on the game clock.

"Down there at the end, 11 seconds, no timeouts, do you run one more play or do you not?" Utah coach Kyle Whittingham said. "I don't think you have a chance to clock it. You take a shot at the end zone, you risk a sack or a turnover. We thought we had a very makeable field goal at 42 yards."

After a bit of confusion, Utes kicker Coleman Petersen trotted out to tie the game. Crowd roaring in the background, the snap was good but the kick was low.

"I'm lucky I'm a tall guy and I jumped up and blocked it," 6-foot-7, 295-pound USC offensive tackle Matt Kalil said. "It hit my forearm so it didn't even get over my hand."

Even the master of last second wins, LSU's lucky Les Miles, had to be impressed with what happened next. From the forearm of Kalil, the ball took one bounce and right into the hands of cornerback Torin Haris, who last week sealed USC's victory over Minnesota with a game-ending interception.

"I didn't break stride," Harris said. "It came right to me, it was the perfect play."

Harris returned the blocked kick 68-yards for a touchdown as the Trojans' bench -- used to having heart attacks at the end of games -- jumped up and down. While Harris celebrated with his teammates to sounds of Conquest, confusion reigned.

Officials called an unsportsmanlike-conduct on the USC bench for running onto the field. The points were off the board but the clock had expired and it appeared the Trojans had won 17-14.

"I was trying to follow what was going on with the refs," quarterback Matt Barkley said. "The defense won this game for us, no doubt about it."

Defense. Special teams. No matter how they did it, a win -- even the first in Pac-12 conference history -- was a win.

"I'm excited we finished that way," Lane Kiffin said, possibly to the chagrin of the USC fans at the Coliseum. "The energy in the locker room and the sideline, that energy and emotion pull a team together. Wins like this can be really special. I'm proud of our players. It's not an easy thing to do but I'm actually glad with the way it ended."

The way it ended though, was up for interpretation. For a conference that made a point to retool their officiating after taking heaps of criticism, the Pac-12 sure seemed a lot like the bumbling Pac-10 following the game.

Over a half hour after players and coaches had given their post-game press conferences, rumors circulated that the league office was reviewing the ending of the game. On the field, officials had ruled Harris' return a touchdown but took the points off the board due to the new unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty.

Not so fast said the Pac-12.

"The new Unsportsmanlike Conduct rule is Rule 9, Section 2, Article 1," officiating consultant Mike Pereira said in a statement. "Fouls by players are administered as either live ball or dead ball fouls depending on when they occur. The rule does not apply to substitutes. All Unsportsmanlike Conduct fouls by substitutes are enforced as dead ball fouls.

"Since the game was over, the penalty could not be enforced and the referee stated it was declined by rule. The officials did rule it a touchdown making the final score 23-14."

With the Coliseum empty, there were no cheers for the change except in Las Vegas, where the Trojans were favored by 8.5 points. Call it the blocked kick cover or call it crazy, but the win remains in the USC record books.

"I'm happy for our players and it's really fun to win," Baxter said. "It's so fun to win."

The ending of the game overshadowed its significance for both the conference and Utah. There wasn't just a stage for the first ever Pac-12 conference game, they had a Coliseum and a national television audience. In front of both, the Utes showed they were no longer BCS-busters but a BCS-caliber team despite falling short.

"There's no moral victory here," said offensive tackle John Cullen. "We don't look at it as we wanted to see if we can play SC to 17-14. We want to beat SC. We wanted to come out here and show these guys what we're all about. We showed them we can fight."

"We never had a situation where we felt overmatched or overwhelmed in any way shape or form," Whittingham said. "That's a talented football team from top to bottom. They have as much talent on the team as any in the country, maybe more."

A new, confusing, era of Pac-12 football kicked off Saturday. The team with more talent won.

Seems like a simple equation but, in college football, things rarely are.

9/11/11 a few thoughts.

2011-09-11T00:14:00.000-07:00

It's 9/11/11 and it has officially been ten years since civilians were murdered because they showed up for work. Evil is real and it must be punished at every turn. Never forget that evil can only exist when good men do nothing to challenge it.

We'll Never Get Over It, Nor Should We

2011-09-09T14:48:00.000-07:00

People are discussing the geopolitical implications of 9/11 and how the tragedy changed our country, and most of what's been said has been worthy and serious. But my thoughts, as we hit the 10th anniversary, are more local and particular. I'm in a New York state of mind.

There were two targets, Washington and New York. Washington saw a great military institution attacked, and quickly rebuilt. In Washington people ran barefoot from the White House and the Capitol.

But New York saw a world end. New York saw the buildings come down.

That was the thing. It's not that the towers were hit—we could have taken that. It's not the fire, we could have taken that too. They bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and took out five floors, and the next day we were back in business.

It's that the buildings came down, in front of our eyes. They were there and proud and strong, they were massive, two pillars at the end of the island. And then they groaned to the ground and there was a cloud and when people could finally see they looked back and the buildings weren't there breaking through the clouds anymore. The buildings were a cloud. The buildings were gone and that was too much to bear because they couldn't be gone, they couldn't have fallen. Because no one could knock down those buildings.

And it changed everything. It marked a psychic shift in our town between "safe" and "not safe." It marked the end of impregnable America and began an age of vulnerability. It marked the end of "we are protected" and the beginning of something else.

Enlarge Image
noonan0910
noonan0910
Associated Press

When you ask New Yorkers now what they remember, they start with something big—the first news report, the phone call in which someone said, "Turn on the TV." But then they go to the kind of small thing that when you first saw it you had no idea it would stay in your mind forever. The look on the face of a young Asian woman on Sixth Avenue in the 20s, as she looked upward. The votive candles on the street and the spontaneous shrines that popped up, the pictures of saints. The Xeroxed signs that covered every street pole downtown. A man or a woman in a family picture from a wedding or a birthday or bar mitzvah. "Have you seen Carla? Last seen Tuesday morning in Windows on the World."

The bus driver as I fumbled in my wallet to find my transit card. "Free rides today," he mumbled, in a voice on autopilot. The Pompeii-like ash that left a film on everything in town, all the way to the Bronx. The smell of burning plastic that lingered for weeks. A man who worked at Ground Zero told me: "It's the computers." They didn't melt or decompose, and they wouldn't stop burning. The doctors and nurses who lined up outside St. Vincent's Hospital with gurneys, thinking thousands would come, and the shock when they didn't. The spontaneous Dunkirk-like fleet of ferries that took survivors to New Jersey.

The old woman with her grandchild in a stroller. On the stroller she had written a sign in magic marker: "America You Are Not Alone, Mexico Is With You." She was all by herself in the darkness, on the side of the West Side Highway, as we stood to cheer the workers who were barreling downtown in trucks to begin the dig-out, and to see if they could find someone still alive.
Related Video

Editorial page editor Paul Gigot and deputy editorial page editor Dan Henninger reflect on 9/11.

The notes neighbors left under each other's doors. "Are you OK? Haven't seen you and just thought I'd make sure all is all right." The flags in every bodega, on every storefront, in the windows of apartments, up and down the proud facades of Park Avenue. My beautiful cynical town covered in flags, swept by love and protectiveness toward our country.

At first we didn't know what to call it, so we called it what happened. "Do you believe what happened?" "They think he died in what happened." It was weeks before we called it 9/11. Sometimes tragedy takes time to find a name.

We were half crazy those days. We were half nuts and didn't know it. The trauma on Tuesday was followed in the middle of Thursday night by a storm, a howling banshee that shook buildings—thunder like a cannonade, lightning tearing through the sky. And then there were the stories. We kept hearing about guys who dug themselves out of the rubble. We'd hear a guy came out of the rubble and said, "There's 20 firemen down there in an air pocket," and we'd all put on the news and it was never true. I will never forget this one: As the first tower went down some guy on the 50th floor grabbed a steel girder that was flying by, and he held on for dear life and it landed on a pile of rubble 30 floors below and he got up, brushed himself off, and walked away. That wasn't true either. The stories whipped through the town like the wind, and people grabbed onto them.
More Peggy Noonan

Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns

Click here to order her book, Patriotic Grace

And there were the firemen. They were the heart of it all, the guys who went up the stairs with 50 to 75 pounds of gear and tools on their back. The other people who were there in the towers, they were innocent victims, they went to work that morning and wound up in the middle of a disaster. But the firemen saw the disaster before they went into it, they knew what they were getting into, they made a decision. And a lot of them were scared, you can see it on their faces on the pictures people took in the stairwells. The firemen would be going up one side of the stairs, and the fleeing workers would be going down on the other, right next to them, and they'd call out, "Good luck, son," and, "Thank you, boys."

They were tough men from Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island, and they had families, wives and kids, and they went up those stairs. Captain Terry Hatton of Rescue 1 got as high as the 83rd floor. That's the last time he was seen.

Three hundred forty-three firemen gave their lives that day. Three hundred forty-three! It was impossible, like everything else.

Many heartbreaking things happened after 9/11 and maybe the worst is that there's no heroic statue to them, no big marking of what they were and what they gave, at the new World Trade Center memorial.

But New York will never get over what they did. They live in a lot of hearts.

They tell us to get over it, they say to move on, and they mean it well: We can't bring an air of tragedy into the future. But I will never get over it. To get over it is to get over the guy who stayed behind on a high floor with his friend who was in a wheelchair. To get over it is to get over the woman by herself with the sign in the darkness: "America You Are Not Alone." To get over it is to get over the guys who ran into the fire and not away from the fire.

You've got to be loyal to pain sometimes to be loyal to the glory that came out of it.

Does it Matter that Perry Was a Democrat?

2011-09-09T08:26:00.001-07:00

September 9, 2011 6:00 AM

Since Rick Perry has surged to the front of the GOP pack, questions have been raised about his past membership in the Democratic party, which ended in 1989. Ron Paul recently posted a pretty hard-hitting web video blasting Perry for having backed Al Gore in 1988, and Joe Scarborough – MSNBC’s token Republican – made some snarky comments about Perry last week.

Is there anything to this criticism?

I don’t think so. Let's remember that Perry is not the first former Democrat to run for the Republican nomination. He's not even the first from Texas. He's the third. John Connally ran in 1980, and Phil Gramm ran in 1996 -- both were former Democrats.

Beyond this, a solid understanding of the South’s political transformation over the last century clarifies why a conservative like Perry could support Gore in 1988 and then run as a Republican 24 years later.

The core point to keep in mind is that the South did not become Republican overnight. Its transformation has taken decades and indeed is still ongoing. While Tennessee voted Republican in 1920 and several other states (including Texas) did so in 1928, it took a lot longer for the GOP to infiltrate the state and local levels. Why is that?

For starters, Perry was born in 1950, when there were still lots of bad memories about the Republican party in the South. The older folks back then had heard horror stories from their parents or grandparents about Republican carpetbaggers and scalawags – the (often corrupt) GOP officials who ran the region during Reconstruction. Beyond that, the GOP was most strongly identified with the Great Depression, while the Democrats were associated with FDR and the New Deal, which channeled lots of resources into the South. Meanwhile, Southern Democrats sat atop key committees in Congress, and were able to make sure the South got more than its fair share. (And if you ever wondered why so much of the space program is in the South, well…Lyndon Johnson of Texas was one of its biggest boosters!)

That’s vital context to remember. It’s one thing for a national hero like Dwight Eisenhower, who himself was born in Texas, to win support in Dixie, and quite another for people to start pulling the lever for local Republican candidates, especially when their Democratic representatives were doing so much for them.

What this meant in turn was that elite political actors in the South did not view the Republican party as a practical vehicle for their ambitions. So conservatives, moderates, and liberals would all crowd into the Democratic party, while local Republican candidates were just not to be taken seriously.

So for the first presidential election that an ambitious guy like Rick Perry was eligible to vote for – in 1972 – he probably did what a lot of Southerners did: register Democrat then vote for Richard Nixon.

As late as 1982, the Democrats still held more than 70 percent of all Southern congressional districts. In Texas, they held 76 percent of the state house and 84 percent of the state senate. So, when Perry ran for the legislature in 1984, of course he ran as a Democrat. He’d have been a fool to run as a Republican.

In the 1990s we see the beginning of the end of this political schizophrenia, where the South votes Republican for the White House (and sometimes the Senate), then Democratic for everything else. The GOP took a majority of the Southern congressional seats in 1994, and also won its first Southern state legislative houses. The process has continued ever since, but even now there are a handful of old style Southern Democrats still floating around the House – like Dan Boren of Oklahoma and Mike Ross of Arkansas. Even the deep red state of Alabama did not elect a Republican legislature until 2010, and the GOP has never won control of either house in Arkansas or Louisiana.

So, if you’re a conservative Democrat in Texas in 1988 of course you are going to support Al Gore in the primaries! Remember, Gore was much different back in the 1980s – when he consciously positioned himself in roughly the same place as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, as a moderate who could appeal to voters inside and outside the South. The serious alternatives to Gore that year were Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson, so backing Gore was a no-brainer for a politician like Perry.

Perry switched parties in 1989, which might strike one as a little late in the game. He certainly wasn’t the last conservative to leave the Democratic party, but he wasn’t the first, either. Does that suggest he’s just a fair weather Republican?

I don’t think so. It’s a mistake to view the South as a monolithic region in terms of its politics. Obviously, there are huge racial differences in the region, but even whites have historically been divided across multiple socioeconomic categories. One was the elite planter-lawyer-doctor-merchant class, the “Bourbons,” who ran Southern politics up until about a half century ago. Another category consisted of the downscale, hardscrabble “Jacksonian” farmers who were the most eager backers of the populist insurgency in the 1890s. And most recently we’ve seen the rise of a “New South” middle class that is based on the energy, defense, and tech industries and that has a lot in common with the Northern GOP.

In each Southern state, there were differing mixtures of these and other groups, and the political alliances also varied on a state by state basis. Over time, all three of these groups have worked their way over to the Republican party. The first was the New South middle class, which is why the first solidly GOP House districts in Dixie (outside Appalachia) were in places like Dallas, Houston, and Tampa. Barry Goldwater won the elite Southern class in 1964 because it was the most staunchly segregationist; it then went for Wallace in 1968 and did not vote Republican consistently until after voting rights disappeared as an issue. The most recent entrant to the GOP coalition is that hardscrabble class of old Jacksonians.

Perry’s central Texas home of Haskell County probably falls into this last category. The populists did well here in 1892, the county voted for Hubert Humphrey over Wallace by a 3:1 margin in 1968, and it did not begin consistently voting for Republican presidential candidates until 2000. So it’s really not a surprise to me that Perry didn’t jump ship until after he planned to leave the state legislature.

None of this suggests that attacks on Perry for his Democratic past won’t be successful. They could be, in large part because the complicated history of Southern politics is not very well understood. However, the truth is that Perry’s past in the Texas Democratic party is not really a surprise at all, and frankly doesn’t tell us much of anything about him, as the Southern party was home to conservatives, moderates, and liberals for generations.

The Contradictions of the MSNBC Left

2011-09-09T07:56:00.000-07:00

During the recent GOP presidential debate, MSNBC ran self-promotional commercials for itself. That’s okay; all networks do it. The Hebrew philosopher Hillel’s famous line “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” applies for cable news networks, too. And given MSNBC’s ratings, that wisdom is particularly poignant.

The long-running “Lean Forward” marketing campaign features different MSNBC hosts waxing poetic on the glories of government and liberalism. The ad they kept running during the debate features Rachel Maddow standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam. The spots are a widespread source of ridicule in conservative circles, mostly because they show Maddow on the precipice of the dam in an ad hectoring us all to “lean forward.” You first, Ms. Maddow.

But the real joke of the commercial is the argument behind it. Maddow objects when “people tell us no, no, no we’re not going to build it. No, no, no, America doesn’t have any greatness in its future. America has small things in its future. Other countries have great things in their future. China can afford it. We can’t.” She replies to this chorus of strawmen, “You’re wrong, and it doesn’t feel right to us and it doesn’t sound right to us because that’s not what America is.” It’s one of several ads equating American greatness with big infrastructure spending on the scale of the Hoover Dam.

The reason the ad is so funny is that nobody thinks liberals such as Maddow would support anything like the Hoover Dam today. The Hoover Dam is a marvel. But by today’s green standards, it is a crime against nature. If you tried to build it, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace would be in court tomorrow blocking it, with Ms. Maddow cheering them on.

Indeed, look at all the activists attacking the proposed construction of an oil pipeline from Canada to the Texas coast. It would create thousands of construction jobs and yet liberals oppose it for the usual petrophobic reasons. Ironically, liberals love building highways and bridges, but loathe making it affordable to drive on them.

This is just a small example of the Catch-22 liberalism has found itself in. The Left yearns to “go big” but it wants to do so through the extremely narrow routes it has created for itself. They say government must rush into this economic crisis like firemen into a burning building. But they also don’t want to lighten the useless baggage the firemen must carry or remove the Byzantine obstacle course they’ve decreed the figurative firefighters must run through before getting to work.

Everyone in Washington should reread Jonathan Rauch’s 1994 book Demosclerosis, a term Rauch coined to describe “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt.” Thanks to the rise of interest-group liberalism, constituencies grow up around government programs and policies that do not benefit the general public. Obviously, these constituencies care more about their programs than the average voters do, so they make up for their low numbers with high intensity. The mohair subsidy is the number one priority of only one group of Americans: recipients of mohair subsidies. More significantly, organized labor makes up a tiny fraction of the workforce, but dictates vast swaths of labor policy in this country.

As the number of interest groups claiming sovereignty over their own little slices of policy multiplies, government’s maneuvering room shrinks.

Rauch compared the problem to the “hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.” Before you know it, first responders to Hurricane Katrina have to undergo sensitivity training before they can save people from drowning and “shovel-ready” green jobs require months of “prevailing wage” compliance paper-pushing and are too expensive anyway. Boston’s Big Dig took two decades to build; the far more ambitious Hoover Dam, which Maddow and company love, took four years.

Look, I’m no Keynesian, but there should have been at least an economic sugar rush from the stimulus. There wasn’t, in large part because government has lost its flexibility. We poured money down the same mostly clogged bureaucratic drain. When the last bit burbled away, we were told we must “invest” even more in infrastructure and education. We’ve been doing that for decades. In terms of spending, adjusted for inflation, the size of government has increased 50 percent over the last decade alone.

Who thinks we got anything like a positive return on that “investment”? Why didn’t we? Because money isn’t the problem, government is.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/09/09/the_contradictions_of_the_msnbc_left_111274.html at September 09, 2011 - 07:56:46 AM PDT

Why U.S. Health Care Leads the Way

2011-09-08T14:53:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I had what seemed to me a small medical problem, so I phoned my primary physician. However, after we discussed the problem, he directed me to a specialist.

After the specialist examined me, he directed me to a different specialist elsewhere. When I was examined and tested in the second specialist's office, he immediately phoned a hospital, asking to have an operating room available in an hour.

No more than 5 hours elapsed between my seeing the first specialist and the time when I was on an operating table.

This was quite a contrast with what happens in countries with government-run medical systems. In such countries, it is not uncommon to have to wait days to see a physician, weeks to see a specialist and months before you can have an operation. It is very doubtful whether I would have lasted that long.

In the intensive care unit, where I was sent after the first of two operations, I was hooked up to high-tech machines and had a small army of people looking after me around the clock. Would a government-run medical system have provided all this, especially for a man in his eighties?

In some countries with government-run medical systems, individuals are not even permitted to pay out of their own pockets for medications that the government has ruled are too expensive for people in their age bracket or medical condition.

That same mindset has already become evident in the United States, where a very expensive cancer drug has been refused federal approval to be sold, because it helps only a limited number of people and at very high costs.

But what if you are one of those limited numbers of people -- and you are willing to pay what it costs, with your own money?

You are free to take your life's savings and gamble it away in a casino, if you want to -- but you are not free to use your life's savings to save your life.

This is not an isolated paradox. This is the logical consequence of a vision of the world that prevails all too widely among the intelligentsia, and not just as regards medical care.

In that vision, people can draw on the available resources only to the extent that the government considers appropriate, in the light of other claims on those resources. This treats what the people have produced as if it automatically belongs to the government -- and as if politicians and bureaucrats have both the right and the wisdom to override the personal decisions that the people want to make for themselves.

This issue involves a difference between a world in which people can make their own decisions with their own money and a world in which decisions -- including life and death medical decisions -- are taken out of the hands of millions of people across the country and put into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats in Washington.

One of the big claims for government-run medical systems is that they can "bring down the cost of medical care." But anyone can bring down the cost of anything by simply buying a smaller quantity or a lower quality.

That is why countries with government-run medical systems have waiting lists to see doctors, and even longer waiting lists to see specialists or to get an operation. That is why those countries seldom have as many high-tech medical devices as in the United States or use the newest medications as often.

In those things that are crucially affected by medical care, such as cancer survival rates, the United States leads the way. In things that doctors can do little about -- such as obesity, homicide or drug addiction -- Americans shorten their own lives, more so than people in other comparable societies.

This enables advocates of government-run medical care to cite longevity statistics, in order to claim that our more expensive medical system is less effective, since Americans' longevity does not compare favorably with that in other comparable societies.

For those who think in terms of scoring talking points -- as distinguished from trying to get at the truth -- this kind of argument may sound good. But should something as serious as life and death medical issues be discussed in terms of misleading talking points?

Copyright 2011, Creators Syndicate Inc.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/09/07/two_different_worlds_part_ii_111223.html at September 08, 2011 - 02:53:43 PM PDT

Perry vs. Paul: A Texas-sized war

2011-09-08T10:42:00.000-07:00

The scrap between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney may have gotten more attention in Wednesday’s presidential candidates debate, but it was tame compared to the dust-up between Mr. Perry and Rep. Ron Paul, two Texans who apparently have spent plenty of time digging up dirt on each other and aren’t afraid to use it.

At one point when the video cameras weren’t rolling — though the incident was caught by still photographers — Mr. Perry walked over Mr. Paul’s lectern, took hold of the congressman’s wrist and wagged his finger at him.

The physical exchange was matched by the intensity of the two men’s verbal attacks on each other.

The first shot was invited by the debate moderators, who asked Mr. Paul to expand on his accusations, made in recent days, that Mr. Perry, who has spent more than a decade as governor of Texas, is less conservative than voters think.

“Just take the HPV,” Mr. Paul said, referring to Mr. Perry’s scrapped plan to require schoolgirls in the state to be given a vaccine against the sexually transmitted virus. “Forcing 12-year-old girls to take an inoculation to prevent this sexually transmitted disease, this is not good medicine, I do not believe. I think it’s social misfit.”

Mr. Perry acknowledged he’d gone about the plan the wrong way when he tried to bypass the legislature, but said he’d been trying to combat cervical cancer, which can result from HPV, and said his plan would have allowed parents to opt out of the inoculation program.

Later, after Mr. Perry criticized the health care law Mr. Romney signed in Massachusetts, Mr. Paul jumped in and said Mr. Perry should worry about his own record, since he had written “a really fancy letter supporting Hillarycare” — the health program former first lady Hillary Clinton tried to enact in the 1990s.

Mr. Perry fired back, pointing to a letter Mr. Paul wrote in 1987 announcing he was dropping out of the the party he now seeks to lead because he was disappointed in then-President Reagan.

“Speaking of letters, I was more interested in the one that you wrote to Ronald Reagan back and said I’m going to quit the party because of the things you believe in,” Mr. Perry said.

He didn’t any further before Mr. Paul insisted on responding.

“I support the message of Ronald Reagan. The message was great. But the consequence — we have to be honest with ourselves — it was not all that great,” Mr. Paul said.

The attacks kept up even during the commercial breaks — and not just on stage. Mr. Paul had paid to run an ad during the MSNBC broadcast attacking Mr. Perry, pointing to his support for Al Gore’s presidential bid in the 1980s, including twice calling the governor a “cheerleader.”

“Al Gore found a cheerleader in Texas named Rick Perry,” the ad announcer intones.

Perry: Obama’s Worst Nightmare - Josh Kraushaar - NationalJournal.com

2011-09-07T10:42:00.000-07:00

Perry: Obama’s Worst Nightmare - Josh Kraushaar - NationalJournal.com

The Ripples of 9/11

2011-09-07T08:13:00.000-07:00

The Ripples of 9/11 by Victor Davis Hanson - City Journal

A decade of surprises in the war on terror
6 September 2011

It has been a decade since 3,000 Americans were murdered on September 11, 2001. Much of what followed in the subsequent ten years was unexpected, while what was expected did not happen.

On October 7, just 26 days after the attacks, the United States went after both al-Qaida and its Taliban sponsors when it invaded Afghanistan, removing the Islamists from that nation’s major cities in little more than two months. By early 2002, the “graveyard of empires” had a UN-approved constitutional government—despite earlier warnings of Western failure and a Soviet- or British-like disaster. We forget now the national euphoria over Donald Rumsfeld’s “light footprint” and a new way of war characterized by a few Special Forces troops with laptops who guided volleys of GPS munitions from jets circling above.

The subsequent decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 ended entirely the fragile national consensus about retaliation that had followed 9/11. When the Bush administration hyped WMD as the real casus belli—and subsequently found none in Iraq—most forgot that Congress had, in bipartisan fashion, voted for war on over 20 other counts as well, all legitimate and unquestioned. But the postwar insurgency took over 4,000 American lives and tore Iraq apart, and the war would be written off as misguided, unnecessary, and “lost.” Suddenly too few troops was the charge. Traditional army divisions once again replaced Special Forces as the conventional wisdom.

Few thought, in the dark days of December 2006, that General David Petraeus and his Surge would save Iraq. But the U.S. military met the Islamists’ call for thousands of terrorists to flock to Anbar Province—defeating them, killing thousands, and thereby weakening the global jihadist cause. Soon Iraq, the “bad” war theater, would grow relatively quiet, while the once “good” effort in Afghanistan went bad. Over 100,000 Western NATO and American troops are still fighting a resurgent Taliban in a decade-long effort to prop up the government of Hamid Karzai.

Osama bin Laden had bet that the entire Arab world might erupt in turmoil after the U.S. response to 9/11. It did, but not until a decade later—and neither in anger at the United States, Europe, or Israel, nor at the urging of a reclusive bin Laden in the final months of his life. The more pundits sternly lectured that the “Arab-Israeli” conflict was at the heart of 9/11-generated Islamic anger at the West, the more that conflict seemed irrelevant to the violence that swept the Arab world from Tunisia to Syria. Bashar Assad is now shooting hundreds on sight—his own people, not soldiers of the IDF.

We can disagree about the causes of the popular protests against Middle East strongmen and about whether constitutional government, Mogadishu-like chaos, or Islamic theocracy will arise from them. We can argue, too, over whether we’re witnessing the long-promised ripples of reform in Iraq that would follow from the demise of Saddam Hussein. We do know, though, that the al-Qaida dream of mobilizing the Muslim world against the West—supposedly decadent and imploding, from Europe to America—never quite happened.

Conventional wisdom following 9/11 insisted that we would soon find bin Laden but that his insidious terror gang would probably remain a permanent existential threat that could repeat the September attack almost whenever it wished. A near-decade after the fall of the Twin Towers, bin Laden was finally killed by the United States, right under the nose of his Pakistani hosts. His radical Islamic terrorist organization is in disarray, without popular support, without the old covert subsidies from the oil sheikdoms, and without the infrastructure and networks that it would need to repeat its 9/11 attacks. The old post-9/11 warning of “not if, but when”—referring to the inevitability of more terrorism here—has not panned out so far, mostly because of heightened security at home and the projection of U.S. force abroad.

Following 2001, two additional and unforeseen shifts split America asunder, and—in equally unexpected fashion—are now bringing it back together again. Few initially objected to the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay, renditions, military tribunals, preventive detention, or the use of targeted assassinations via Predator drone. Even enhanced interrogations did not provoke polarizing national debate, given the extraordinary popularity of George W. Bush until 2003 and the widespread fear of more hijacked jetliners. But the unexpected violence in postwar Iraq, the partisan campaigning of the 2004 presidential election, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the absence of more attacks politicized the war on terror, and the popular media reduced the Bush-Cheney administration nearly to the status of war criminals, people who had trumped up nonexistent threats in service to a police state desperate to invent enemies.

What happened next was even more bizarre. In his first year in the White House, Barack Obama, a war critic and foe of the Bush-Cheney protocols, embraced or expanded almost all of the measures that he and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had long derided—apparently because what had seemed superfluous to a candidate proved essential to a president with responsibility for the safety of 300 million people. In lockstep, his supporters ceased their outcries about lost civil liberties. What had not long ago been decried as either unconstitutional or useless was suddenly assumed to be both legal and necessary—and surely not controversial enough to prompt questioning of the Obama administration, now the steward of the decade-old protocols.

And so, on the fifth anniversary of September 11 in 2006, the country had become split apart over Iraq, mostly amnesiac about Afghanistan, and receptive to the liberal narrative that the terrorists had won by scaring us into abandoning our values. In contrast, on the tenth anniversary, Americans have come nearly full circle: anxious about renewed violence in Afghanistan, increasingly unconcerned with Iraq, and relieved that postwar homeland security measures have kept them safe.

The common denominator in these ten years? American life under its hypercritical, volatile, and mercurial democracy proves resilient; the Islamic terrorists and their authoritarian sponsors who would destroy it do not. And even after a decade of acrimony, partisan rancor, and stasis, Americans continue to be horrified—and angry—over those who were murdered on September 11. We’ve done our best for ten years to ensure that it cannot happen again.

Victor Davis Hanson is a contributing editor of City Journal. He is the author of the forthcoming novel The End of Sparta.

Is Barack Obama Dumb?

2011-09-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

A mere four months ago, most readers looking at the above headline would undoubtedly shake their heads and think the author was a gun-for-hire Tea Party provocateur and quickly click away from the page. But the political climate has changed dramatically this summer, and even hard-core liberals are wondering about the smarts of President Obama as they consider the perceived nightmare of President Rick Perry (who was victim of the same headline last week on Politico). It’s a measure of Obama’s current electoral pickle that some of those questioning the President’s decisions (or lack thereof) write for The New York Times and openly wonder if the man can get re-elected, whether it’s Perry or Mitt Romney who wins the GOP nomination next year.

There are usual caveats: Of course Obama isn’t illiterate or Bush-dumb because as Jesse Louis Jackson once said, “God doesn’t make junk,” and the intelligence-challenged just aren’t allowed near Harvard, much less become editor of that university’s Law Review. And man, he sure can deliver (teleprompter notwithstanding) an inspiring speech! Let’s get this out the way now: in my view, without meeting either man, it’s silly to call either Obama or Perry “dumb.” Obama’s first three years in the White House have been, depending upon your views, disappointing, lackluster or just plain disastrous. But, unlike The Wall Street Journal’s excellent op-ed columnist Bret Stephens, who argued, “Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump. The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does,” it’s hard to believe the President is lacking in intelligence.

Nevertheless, in modern times, no man has been elected president without demonstrating considerable cunning, a flair for cut-throat attacks on the competition and a firm grasp on the mood of the country. And no one can ever take away the brilliance of Obama’s 2008 campaign, his ability to beat the Clinton machine and correctly realize that he’d never have another opportunity so ripe to exploit for an historical election. Really, in 2007, if the question were posed about who’d ascend to Oval Office first, a woman or a black man, the overwhelming majority would’ve picked the former. Similarly, pundits make vicious jokes about Perry’s supposed low-wattage, and while it’s true he’s probably never recited lines from Yeats or Browning in conversation at a collegiate cocktail party, the man has won three gubernatorial elections in Texas, defying the Republican establishment in that state again and again, so there’s something going on above his neck.

As I’ve written before in this space, Perry’s adherence to creationism, apparent fear of homosexuals, abortion opposition, constant invocations of God and dismissal of global warming make me queasy, but in next year’s election those extreme right-wing positions won’t really matter. The only issue is the dreadful economy, which shows no sign of improving before voters pass down their verdict, and while you can scoff at Texas’ remarkable job creation in the past several years—the general liberal reckoning is that all those jobs are at minimum-wage fast food joints—it’s not as if Obama can make any boasts about his own record on that score. The Times’ nominal conservative columnist David Brooks, who clearly prefers the more socially acceptable Romney, concluded his August 25 column “President Rick Perry?” (typically late in raising the possibility), by saying that although Romney would be superior in “managing economic problems” (dubious), “Romney might be able to beat back the Perry surge. In the meantime, it’s time to take Perry seriously. He could be our next president.”

Yet what really demonstrated the bewilderment and fear among those who live, in Brooks’ words, the “Acela corridor,” was his colleague Frank Bruni’s Sept. 4 column “Pass, Fail and Politics,” in which he completely dismissed the notion of a presidential candidate’s intelligence, saying that making such a query is “a vessel for prejudices, a stand-in for grievances.” Bruni’s piece is perfectly timed, and though he’s a rabid liberal, you could sense that what he really wanted to say, but just couldn’t, was Won’t Someone Please Run Against Obama in the Democratic Primaries. Maybe next month, after the next dismal jobs report.

Anyway, while expressing abhorrence for Perry’s social conservatism, Bruni isn’t buying the idea that the Texan is stupid. His damning conclusion: “Instead of talking about how smart politicians are or aren’t, we should have an infinitely more useful conversation about whether we share and respect their values and whether they have shown themselves to be effective. Someone who rates high on both counts is someone to rally unreservedly around. Right now, neither Perry nor Obama fits that double bill.”

The “Acela” cognoscenti ought not take that paragraph lightly, for not only is Bruni implying that Perry will be the Republican presidential candidate, but that Obama’s a failed president. When a Democratic president loses the op-ed braintrust of The New York Times, the jig is up.

Time to Revive Home Ec

2011-09-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

Time to Revive Home Ec
By HELEN ZOE VEIT

East Lansing, Mich.

NOBODY likes home economics. For most people, the phrase evokes bland food, bad sewing and self-righteous fussiness.

But home economics is more than a 1950s teacher in cat’s-eye glasses showing her female students how to make a white sauce. Reviving the program, and its original premises — that producing good, nutritious food is profoundly important, that it takes study and practice, and that it can and should be taught through the public school system — could help us in the fight against obesity and chronic disease today.

The home economics movement was founded on the belief that housework and food preparation were important subjects that should be studied scientifically. The first classes occurred in the agricultural and technical colleges that were built from the proceeds of federal land grants in the 1860s. By the early 20th century, and increasingly after the passage of federal legislation like the 1917 Smith-Hughes Act, which provided support for the training of teachers in home economics, there were classes in elementary, middle and high schools across the country. When universities excluded women from most departments, home economics was a back door into higher education. Once there, women worked hard to make the case that “domestic science” was in fact a scientific discipline, linked to chemistry, biology and bacteriology.

Indeed, in the early 20th century, home economics was a serious subject. When few understood germ theory and almost no one had heard of vitamins, home economics classes offered vital information about washing hands regularly, eating fruits and vegetables and not feeding coffee to babies, among other lessons.

Eventually, however, the discipline’s basic tenets about health and hygiene became so thoroughly popularized that they came to seem like common sense. As a result, their early proponents came to look like old maids stating the obvious instead of the innovators and scientists that many of them really were. Increasingly, home economists’ eagerness to dispense advice on everything from eating to sleeping to posture galled.

Today we remember only the stereotypes about home economics, while forgetting the movement’s crucial lessons on healthy eating and cooking.

Too many Americans simply don’t know how to cook. Our diets, consisting of highly processed foods made cheaply outside the home thanks to subsidized corn and soy, have contributed to an enormous health crisis. More than half of all adults and more than a third of all children are overweight or obese. Chronic diseases associated with weight gain, like heart disease and diabetes, are hobbling more and more Americans.

In the last decade, many cities and states have tried — and generally failed — to tax junk food or to ban the use of food stamps to buy soda. Clearly, many people are leery of any governmental steps to promote healthy eating; Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity has inspired right-wing panic about a secret food police.

But what if the government put the tools of obesity prevention in the hands of children themselves, by teaching them how to cook?

My first brush with home economics, as a seventh grader in a North Carolina public school two decades ago, was grim. The most sophisticated cooking we did was opening a can of pre-made biscuit dough, sticking our thumbs in the center of each raw biscuit to make a hole, and then handing them over to the teacher, who dipped them in hot grease to make doughnuts.

Cooking classes for public school students need not be so utterly stripped of content, or so cynical about students’ abilities to cook and enjoy high-quality food.

A year later, my father’s job took our family to Wales, where I attended, for a few months, a large school in a mid-size industrial city. There, students brought ingredients from home and learned to follow recipes, some simple and some not-so-simple, eventually making vegetable soups and meat and potato pies from scratch. It was the first time I had ever really cooked anything. I remember that it was fun, and with an instructor standing by, it wasn’t hard. Those were deeply empowering lessons, ones that stuck with me when I first started cooking for myself in earnest after college.

In the midst of contracting school budgets and test-oriented curricula, the idea of reviving home economics as part of a broad offensive against obesity might sound outlandish. But teaching cooking — real cooking — in public schools could help address a host of problems facing Americans today. The history of home economics shows it’s possible.

Helen Zoe Veit, an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University, is the author of the forthcoming “Victory Over Ourselves: American Food in the Era of the Great War.”

Hoffa Threatens GOP At Obama Event: "Take These Son Of Bitches Out"

2011-09-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

Hoffa Threatens GOP At Obama Event: "Take These Son Of Bitches Out"

I love this hopey changy thing and all of its civility! The president saying nothing is as bad as him endorsing it.

Danny Welbeck - the missing link

2011-09-06T08:20:00.000-07:00

Young Danny Welbeck may be the missing link in Sir Alex Ferguson's incredible career

In a Manchester United career spanning 25 years this season, Sir Alex Ferguson has done it all.

An astonishing 12 league titles, 4 league cups, 5 F.A. cups and 2 European Champions Leagues, not to mention the number of finals United have reached throughout his time.

Not only has Ferguson won it all, he has shown that he can continually revitalise and invigorate his sides with young talent – British or foreign – from the Red Devil’s academy.

From Fergie’s Fledglings (“you’ll win nothing with kids”) of Ryan Giggs and then David Beckham, Paul Scholes, the Neville brothers and Nicky Butt; to the next generation of admittedly lesser – but still important – players such as Wes Brown and John O’Shea; those around the United squad with whom the verdict is still out, Johnny Evans and Darron Gibson; and the new breed that’s performing so admirably already this season, Tom Cleverley and the most important of all, Danny Welbeck.

Danny Welbeck – it can be argued – is the one missing piece in the puzzle that depicts Sir Alex’s career. The Manchester born youth academy graduate that comes all the way through to England international status under Ferguson’s watch could, and should, be Welbeck.

Now Ferguson’s ability to polish foreign players such as Eric Cantona, Dwight Yorke, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Cristiano Ronaldo should not be ignored – it is an exceptional list of attackers that he has produced.

Nor should the contribution to England’s cause be forgotten – Andy Cole and Teddy Sherringham both shone brightest at United, not to mention a certain Wayne Rooney, but in terms of defenders who’ve come through at United to play for England you have the Nevilles (85 caps for Gary, 59 for Phil) and Wes Brown (23) and in midfield, David Beckham (115), Paul Scholes (66) and Nicky Butt (39.)

It may be early days in his United career but Danny Welbeck has started the season at a blistering pace, firstly with his shock inclusion in the starting XI for the Community Shield versus Manchester City, and then retaining his place in the league fixtures at the expense of last season’s Premier League golden boot winner Dimitar Berbatov.

Whilst he didn’t score against West Bromwich Albion in United’s inaugural match this season, he more than made up for it in the 3-0 home victory of Tottenham. First heading in Cleverley’s cross for the opener and then playing an audacious back heel across the box for Anderson to score the second.

He followed up this fine performance by grabbing the opener against Arsenal in the 8-2 rout at Old Trafford with a strong header that showed his battling qualities (admittedly shrugging off a powder puff Johan Djourou) before coming off injured in the first half.

He had already shown a penchant for scoring in high profile fixtures – such as notching the third in the 0-3 Sunderland victory at Stamford Bridge last season versus Chelsea.

Whilst it’s hard to not get excited over this flying start to the season, particularly from an England supporters perspective, the partnership struck up with Rooney looks dynamic, energetic and creative, aspects of which an Andy Carroll-Rooney relationship lack.

Welbeck impressed on loan at Sunderland sufficiently to earn his first international cap in the friendly 1-1 draw with Ghana last season, and Fabio Capello - another manager with a penchant for spotting rare talent in young players (see: Raul, Paulo Maldini) and giving them a chance – had been impressed enough to include him in his squad for the Holland game and the preliminary squad for the European qualifiers before his injury at Arsenal.

It’s early days in his Manchester United career, but Welbeck looks to have all the aspects required to succeed for United and England for many years. As long as his electric pace isn’t seared by hamstring injuries the likes of which we saw on Saturday, he could partner Rooney for club and country for the next five seasons and beyond.

Tall, strong, speedy, good in the air, a clinical finisher and by all accounts willing to work hard to make the most of his talent, it will be very interesting to watch the rest of his breakthrough season unfold at United once he returns from injury.

http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php

2011-09-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php

The White House mess

2011-09-02T09:52:00.000-07:00

--John Podhoretz - NYPOST.com

By JOHN PODHORETZ

Last Updated: 3:55 AM, September 2, 2011

Posted: 10:19 PM, September 1, 2011

We will little note nor long remember Wednesday’s breathless kerfuffle, with the White House deciding to schedule a speech in front of a joint session of Congress without actually asking Congress first -- and planning for it during a long-planned Republican debate.

The White House spin doctors told some fibs, realized they looked petty and unseemly, then backed off and moved it a day. This won’t even rise to the level of a Jeopardy question in a year’s time.

But supporters of President Obama outside the White House have every reason to be terrified by what happened on Wednesday -- and I choose the word “terrified” carefully.

For the incident suggests that the White House’s sense of how things work has grown dangerously distorted. And if this White House is broken, it’s not good for anyone.

A successful presidency tends to run like a well-oiled machine. The Reagan White House was a famously fractious place; its aides did great damage fighting and leaking against each other. But the work product -- the White House’s political communication and interaction with Capitol Hill, with the rest of the executive branch and with the public -- was technically proficient and highly professional.

I spent six months working in the Reagan White House in 1988, and in a working life of 30 years, I’ve never seen any organization function as smoothly. Everybody knew his job; everybody knew how to do his job; there were systems in place to handle conflicts and arguments.

In September 1991, I began a reporting project on the re-election efforts of the White House of George H.W. Bush that carried through to the election he lost in 1992. As I watched and interviewed, it was clear that the White House organization Bush had inherited from Ronald Reagan had ceased to function effectively.

Senior officials failed to relay work goals and aims to their underlings. There was no effective process for determining policy, and the process by which the White House communicated to the rest of the government and to the public was even worse.

One telling result of this confusion and chaos was that all kinds of little things began to go wrong. Events were poorly planned. Rival drafts of speeches circulated, and no one knew which one was the official draft and which was the effort to undercut it.

The sense of directionlessness and confusion was crystallized when President Bush went to New Hampshire and read the words “Message: I Care” off a card provided by his staff. He wasn’t supposed to speak them, but to talk extemporaneously and give the impression that he cared. But no one had bothered to tell him that was the approach of the day, or that the cards weren’t speech texts.

Such gaffes were indicative of a political organization that had gone off the rails. But, to be fair to the elder Bush, a man and president of uncommon dignity and unrivaled comportment, he would never have stood for a piece of petty gamesmanship like trying to use the powers of the office to attempt to trump the rival party’s debate.

Obviously, even a disastrously managed White House -- like Bill Clinton’s -- can make it through the worst of its own behavior if conditions are optimal for its survival.

Obama is his own man, of course. He has nothing of Clinton’s cold self-indulgence and little of Bush’s patrician forbearance. But like them, he has no idea how to manage his own operation.

The glimpse we got of that on Wednesday gives his supporters every reason to fear that his re-election campaign will resemble his triumphant 2008 bid about as much as the bumbling White House of the first President Bush resembled the extraordinarily accomplished White House of Ronald Reagan.

The book I wrote as a young conservative about the Bush White House was called “Hell of a Ride.” I hereby grant rights to a resourceful young liberal willing to open his eyes to the truth about the Obama White House to “Hell of a Ride 2.”

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_white_house_mess_l0YjtbvWy1phypceqQveWO#ixzz1Woa9yPVY

Perry's 'loser pays' is an economic winner

2011-09-02T08:29:00.000-07:00

RUSSELL & GLEASON: Perry's 'loser pays' is an economic winner - Washington Times

There isn't much policywise coming out of Europe these days that one would expect a conservative like Texas Gov. Rick Perry to emulate because the Continent typically is the domain of the left. However, Mr. Perry recently imported a reform from across the pond that is sure to make the Lone Star State, already the economic envy of the nation, even more of a job-creating juggernaut.

Under the current American legal system, each side in litigation typically retains financial responsibility for its own legal fees absent a prearranged agreement stating otherwise. Yet under the English rule, adopted by virtually every other legal system in the West, the responsibility for attorneys' fees can be summed up in two words: Loser pays. When two sides enter into litigation, the losing side must pay the winning side any damages awarded, as well as compensation for legal fees incurred by the victor.

Mr. Perry made passage of a modified version of the English loser-pays rule a top priority during this year's biennial session of the Texas Legislature. After emphasizing the need for such tort reform during his State of the State address in February, Mr. Perry made loser pays the law of the land in Texas by signing H.B. 274 in May.

As Mr. Perry remarked in his signing statement, loser pays "provides defendants and judges with a variety of tools that will cut down on frivolous and costly claims in Texas."

The appeal of loser pays is that it mitigates unjustified lawsuits against individuals and businesses. Empirically, it has been shown that the loser-pays system incentivizes two conflicting parties to settle outside of court, meaning savings on attorneys' fees for both sides as well as reduced costs for taxpayers caused by a less congested court system for the state and plaintiffs who have warranted cases.

According to Ryan Brannan, policy analyst for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, loser pays makes the legal system more objective and legitimate. "The procedural protections ... go a long way toward ensuring that our judicial system dispenses justice according to the merits of the case rather than the size of the wallet," Mr. Brannan said.

Unlike the English-style loser-pays rule, the Texas version applies in certain situations and does not apply to class-action suits, an action by or against the government or anything in small claims court.

While more constrained than English-style loser pays, the Texas version allows an impartial judge to determine when a lawsuit has, according to the language of the law, "no basis in law or fact on motion and without evidence," giving the judge the authority to declare an early dismissal when appropriate.

This is not the first time Mr. Perry has tackled necessary pro-growth tort reform. The implementation of loser pays in Texas comes on the heels of Mr. Perry's landmark 2003 medical liability reforms, which established a burden of proof for punitive damages similar to criminal law by requiring a unanimous jury verdict and capped noneconomic damages at $750,000. A 2008 report by the Perryman Group found those reforms to be directly responsible for an immediate first-year influx of almost 2,000 new physicians into Texas as well as a 70 percent drop in lawsuits against hospitals. The Texas Public Policy Foundation estimates that the state has netted more than 25,000 doctors since. Following the 2003 reforms, Texas doctors saw medical liability insurance rates decline by an average of more than 21 percent, with some seeing nearly a 50 percent rate cut. Those savings enabled hospitals to expand charity care by 24 percent. Three years after these lawsuit reforms, Texas became the first state ever to be removed from the American Medical Association's list of states experiencing a liability crisis.

Loser pays, which took effect on Thursday, is expected to have a positive impact on the already booming Texas economy once it takes effect. Jeff Moseley, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Houston Partnership, states that "loser pays legislation protects businesses and helps us grow jobs and paychecks."

After Texas was rated as the top state in which to do business for the past seven years by CEO Magazine, it was hard for some to imagine how to make Texas an even more attractive place for employers to create jobs. Yet, with the passage of loser pays, Mr. Perry has found a way to do just that. There is a strong case to be made that Perry-style reforms could help revive the sluggish national economy.

Patrick Gleason is director of state affairs at Americans for Tax Reform. Jason Russell is the group's state affairs associate.

Rick Perry For President, Y’All

2011-09-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, Republicans waiting for the proverbial man on the white horse to ride in and save them from an unsatisfactory 2012 primary field got their answer, or at any rate the best answer they are likely to get: Texas Governor Rick Perry. And while Perry entered stage right, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, my previous choice among the announced candidates in the field, exited stage center-right, leaving the choice – to me – an obvious one: Rick Perry for President, y’all.

The Governor From Central Casting

Perry is in many ways a blindingly obvious choice to fill a gap in the presidential field. He’s the longest-serving Governor in the history of the nation’s second-largest state, a state with a long and disputatious foreign border; his predecessor in the job served two terms as President. He’s won statewide election six times, a record matched only by one previous President (Bill Clinton, whose terms were shorter), and has held statewide office continuously for two decades, since Barack Obama was in law school. He’s defeated liberal icon Jim Hightower, survived the Democratic wave of 2006, and beaten African-American, Latino and female opponents (showing his ability to survive Obama-style identity politics), the last a primary challenge by a sitting Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who had Establishment backing as prominent as Dick Cheney. He’s never lost an election since winning his seat in the Texas Legislature in 1984. He served overseas in the Air Force, flying C-130 transports for five years during the Cold War in the mid-70s in places like Germany and Saudi Arabia, joining just as the Vietnam War was winding down (he’d been in an ROTC-style organization at Texas A&M). Like Mitt Romney, he has great hair and looks like a guy Hollywood would cast as a president – which may seem like an awfully silly way to pick a President, but one of Pawlenty’s problems seemed to be a lack of perceived gravitas arising from his decidedly nerdy appearance. Perry has no such problems.

In a red-blue nation, Perry has been a protean political figure, making a journey from Establishment Southern Democrat (in 1988 he was statewide chair for the Al Gore for President campaign) to Establishment Republican (in 1998 he was George W. Bush’s running mate, and he originally took office when Bush resigned after winning the 2000 election) to Tea Party-backed iconoclast (in 2010, as noted, he faced a moderate Establishment rebellion, and survived by cementing his popularity with Texas Tea Partiers and other conservative grassroots). But Perry has changed his politics more than his policies over the years (even as a Democrat he was distinguished as a foe of government spending); while he has any politician’s vulnerability to charges of flip-flopping, pandering and beliefs of convenience at times, he has nothing like Mitt Romney’s vast catalogue of flip-flops in a career in public office barely a fifth as long.

Perry’s strong economic record as Texas Governor, swimming against the national tide, is his strongest selling point (and as such has attracted the most immediate and incoherent assaults). He may have gotten a D in economics in college, when he was still a Democrat, but his much more relevant grade came in 2009, when his state’s bond rating was upgraded to AA+ by Standard & Poor’s on the basis of his 2010-11 budget.

The Real Thing

Perry’s record is solidly but far from perfectly conservative; honestly, there’s not that much difference between him and Pawlenty that’s not explained by the difference between Texas and Minnesota. He’s not the Platonic ideal Republican candidate. He’s not a brilliant policy innovator like Bobby Jindal, a budget wonk extraordinaire like Paul Ryan, or an exemplar of Tea Party purity like Michele Bachmann. He hasn’t faced down a hostile polity like Chris Christie or Scott Walker, or led a faction within the party like Jim DeMint or Pat Toomey. He lacks Marco Rubio’s spellbinding eloquence, Sarah Palin’s biting wit or Allen West’s martial ferocity. He hasn’t been a successful businessman like Romney or Herman Cain, or a decorated combat veteran like West or John McCain. He’s a career politician. And as a 61 year old white male Texas Baby Boomer who has been in office for a quarter century and who sometimes sounds like George W. Bush, he’s not in any way a “new face” for the party.

But the Republican Party right now has plenty of enthusiasm and plenty of ideas. What it has been looking for is a leader with credibility in governance, and that’s Perry. With over a decade in office in a huge, Republican-dominated state, Perry isn’t selling castles in the air, he’s selling an alternative vision of how government should operate, implemented and road-tested through good times and bad. From the new security demands of 9/11, to a decade of balancing budgets with ebbing and flowing tax revenues, to creating jobs through two recessions, to immigration from neighboring Mexico, to crises ranging from Hurricanes Rita and Ike to eruptions of Islamic extremism at Fort Hood to every variety of social ill and social-issue controversy, Perry has had to grapple with the full menu of practical challenges that come with governing responsibility. Many a buck has stopped at his desk. His answers may not always have been ideal, but the voters will be able to judge him, for good and ill, on a long and proven record.

On my 2008 checklist of five types of experience we look for in presidential candidates, Perry scores strongly on two (executive experience and political leadership experience) by virtue of his long tenure as Texas Governor and the state party’s consistent success under his guidance. He’s not a combat veteran, but has worn his country’s uniform abroad. On foreign affairs, he’s somewhat typical of a long-serving border-state governor – he’s well-traveled and well-versed in immigration and trade issues (probably nobody in America has more practical experience dealing with immigration and the Mexican border), but still has much to prove on national security. He can also boast some private sector business experience from his time as a rancher before running for office – hardly a vast enterprise, but one that teaches a good deal from the ground level up about how to make ends meet. As I’ve noted before, no one factor is essential – although executive experience is by far the most important – and only two presidents (George Washington and George H.W. Bush) entered office with a strong resume in all five categories. So, Perry comes out looking pretty good on that test.

After 2 1/2 years of a President who entered the White House as a wish-projection object with no track record running anything, America deserves a leader who already knows how to lead and has gotten his rookie mistakes out of his system.

Holding Out For A Hero

Every successful presidential campaign requires a little touch of hero-worship and personality cult, although again the Obama experience demonstrates the dangers of overdosing on this sort of thing. Perry, as a poster boy for gun-toting Texans (he once shot a coyote while jogging), has inspired a bit of that. If you’ve seen the burgeoning “Rick Perry Facts” meme on the web (@rickperryfacts on Twitter, for example), after the mold of the Chuck Norris Facts, they’re a good example of pumping up Perry’s Texas tough guy image with the proper air of absurdity to avoid taking themselves too seriously. Nobody is going to depict Perry as a “Lightworker” who brings meaning to our lives, paint pictures of him astride a unicorn, or argue that he will fundamentally change the American people or hold back the tides. He’s simply a successful political leader who wants to apply his talents to improving how our federal government works, in many cases by imitating things that have already been done on the federal or state level in the past.

We all have our biases in preferring candidates. I know three of mine. One, which Perry fits just as have Pawlenty, Palin, Ryan, Rubio, Giuliani, Christie, and even Ronald Reagan, is a preference for Republicans who didn’t grow up wealthy or from prominent families, who have had to scrap their way up the ladder. I’ve voted for my share of to-the-manor-born Republicans and surely will again, but I still feel like Republicans who have had to claw their way up from middle-class or harder backgrounds tend to understand better at a gut level what the party really stands for, how hard it has to work to win, and why it appeals to Americans who don’t come from money and influence. But Perry doesn’t exactly fit the second (I tend to like candidates who are, like me, either lawyers or otherwise talkers, fast on their feet and clever in debate) and as for the third…so sue me, I’m a New Yorker, I prefer not to run Southerners, who tend to get counted out easily by much of the rest of the country. But it’s important to know your biases precisely so you don’t let them dictate your choices. I’d rather have run a candidate from another region of the country, but if Perry’s the best we have – and I think of the current field he is, and that whatever rumors you hear, we’re unlikely to get another top-shelf entrant – he’s my candidate. He doesn’t need to be my hero.

I’m the Map, I’m the Map, I’m the Map

Here is where the entry of Perry gets interesting and a little dicey. One of the primary reasons why I’d been open to possibly continuing to support Pawlenty even if he and Perry were both in the field is the 2012 map. As I have written before, the demographics of the true swing states in 2012 are likely to determine the two sides’ battle plans.

Let me offer my current seat-of-the-pants analysis of what that map will look like. This is based in good part on history and educated speculation; it’s too early to have meaningful hard data and dangerous to project too much certainty on current polling.

Realistically, given Obama’s current weaknesses and the traditional GOP loyalties of those states, I expect that Ohio, Florida and Indiana will end up in the GOP column so long as the Republican candidate is competitive – in other words, I can’t foresee the situation where Republicans lose the election because of a failure to win one of those states. Meanwhile, so long as the bottom doesn’t drop out on him, Obama’s likely to hold on in Minnesota, but Republicans will have opportunities in other states of the Midwest and Upper Midwest that have tended to run Democratic in the past two decades. I also think the demographics make it at least an open question whether the GOP can reclaim Virginia and North Carolina, although (1) Democrats mostly got drubbed there in 2009-2010 (besides the NC-GOV race) and (2) Obama only won NC by a hair in 2008 anyway, with less than 50% of the vote, so his margin of error there is almost nonexistent. In general, polling has tended to show that Obama is more popular than you’d expect from national numbers and the local partisan climate in federal worker-heavy Virginia, less popular than you’d expect in bitter, clinging Pennsylvania.

This is what my current map looks like:

You will notice that this puts the GOP 32 electoral votes short of the goal line, with the remaining votes up for graps divided into the following buckets:

The Midwest: 52 votes, 16 of them in the white-bread Upper Midwest states of Wisconsin and Iowa, 36 in the more traditional Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania and Michigan. These were states where the Democrats got slaughtered in 2010, with the GOP winning governorships in all four (as well as Senate races in PA & WI). New Hampshire’s 4 electoral votes are likely to trend in a similar direction as these four states, bringing the swing total to 56. If Ohio, Indiana and Minnesota come onto the table, that expands this region by another 39 votes. The Midwest is huge.

The Tidewater: VA & NC were both red states under Bush, but an influx of northerners to NC’s Research Triangle and to the federal worker and contractor dominated Northern Virginia region, combined with heavy African-American turnout, swung both states for Obama in 2008. (If you prefer, we can call these two the Big Ten and the ACC). VA & NC carry 28 electoral votes; adding them on this map leaves the Republican candidate just one state from victory.

The High Desert: CO & NV were mostly reliable red states that have been pulled left by demographic changes (growing Latino populations, influxes of Californians), heavy union organization in NV, and a pair of especially ineptly run state Republican organizations. NM is a more traditionally Democratic state, but was won by Bush in 2004 and went Republican in the 2010 Governor’s race (both NV & NM elected Hispanic Republican governors in 2010). I’ve tended to assume Obama wins all three, but they will be close-run races, with a total prize of 20 electoral votes.

The predominance of the Midwest would seem to argue for a candidate more suited to that region than a guy like Perry who embodies Texas swagger. That’s where Pawlenty could have come in handy, with his careful balance of blue-collar scrappiness and “Minnesota nice” and record of lasting two statewide terms in blue Minnesota without emerging hopelessly compromised. But in retrospect, the defining moment of Pawlenty’s campaign ended up coming when he blasted Mitt Romney’s health care record as “Obamaneycare” on a Sunday talk show, but refused to repeat the line in Romney’s presence in a June debate in New Hampshire. Pawlenty ended up with the worst of both worlds, looking less like a scrapper than like a rabbit-puncher who wasn’t willing to slug with the big boys. Pawlenty ended up bowing out with class as soon as his path to victory was closed off after the Ames Straw Poll.

But if Perry is perhaps not the best fit for the Midwest, one advantage of Perry being a Texan is that, as Richard Cohen sagely notes, Texas is culturally, geographically and politically part of both the South and the West. As a result, Perry is in some sense campaigning on home turf as far east as Florida and Virginia and as far west as Arizona and Idaho. He’ll look and sound very much like the kind of Republican candidate who wins elections in Virginia and North Carolina. And a corollary is that Texas’ unique historic and demographic ties to Mexico means that a successful long-time Texas politician like Perry is much more at home campaigning for Latino support than a candidate from the Upper Midwest would be, giving him a better chance of running strongly in the three High Desert states.

Buckle Your Seatbelts

Barack Obama, like Harry Reid in 2010 and Gray Davis in 2002, is likely to enter the 2012 election needing to make the race about something other than his own unpopular and unsuccessful record in office; indeed, that was one major reason why I’d been attracted to the relatively bland Pawlenty. Perry lacks obvious weak points – he can’t be painted as a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he can’t be caricatured as a Bill Simon-type corporate predator or a Sharron Angle-type batty extremist. Even some of his more eccentric-sounding ideas, like his criticism of the Sixteenth Amendment, are grounded in his experience balancing budgets and presiding over economic growth in a state with no income tax.

The fact of Perry’s Texas-ness and Obama’s own needs make the primary attacks on him wholly predictable. The demographics of the swing states and Obama’s 2008 coalition only amplify his side’s natural inclination to run a racially divisive campaign. Obama’s poll numbers, plunging along with the economy, will exacerbate this tendency. An incident last week perfectly captures this dynamic. Perry referred on the campaign trail to the national debt as a “big black cloud that hangs over America,” and MSNBC pounced, editing out the reference to the debt and asserting that Perry was referring to Obama as a “big black cloud”. Ed Schultz was forced to do a retraction – even Jon Stewart defended Perry on this one – but attacks of this nature never truly go away even after the inevitable insincere apology. Expect more “big black cloud”-style nonsense for the next 15 months.

One of the pet sound bites of Perry’s less literate critics has been the notion that he’s some kind of secessionist, an urban myth that comes from how he tried to talk down some heated chatter in 2010:

What actually happened was that after people shouted “Secede!” at an Austin rally, he said that he understood their frustration but added, “We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that. Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.”

Perry emphasized that he was not advocating secession, but understands why Americans may have those feelings because of frustration. He said it’s fine to express the thought. He offered no apology and did not back away from his earlier comments. Perry’s remarks were in response to a question from The Associated Press as he walked away from the rally.

This is, of course, a textbook example of how to respond to people with extreme-sounding ideas without agreeing with them. But just as important, it’s not, as some left-wingers would have it, a species of neo-Confederacy. “Secession” may have an automatic association with the Stars and Bars to people in, say, Ohio or South Carolina, but in Texas it’s part of a much longer-standing tradition of Texas nationalism. Recall that Texas is one of just two states to have once been an independent nation (the other, Hawaii, has not only a lingering nationalism of its own but an active movement to enshrine in law a rule of racial superiority for its native people), and became independent by seceding from Mexico – to Texans, independence and secession are first and foremost associated with the Alamo, not Fort Sumter. But don’t expect that history to be understood by people who automatically salivated at the sound of “big black raincloud.”

Another brand of really disqualifying-sounding attacks has been the decade-old whispering campaign (I swear I saw it on left-wing blogs as far back as 2002) to paint Perry as gay, a womanizer, or maybe even a gay womanizer (what can’t he do?). But similar campaigns have failed to damage Obama (remember Vera Baker?), George H.W. Bush, or even guys with more checkered marital records like John Kerry and John McCain. Americans are usually pretty good about knowing when to write off critics who don’t have the goods on this kind of story. You never know with a guy until he’s been road-tested at the national level, but … well, the guy who keeps trying to push these stories to us at RedState has a long history of touting claims that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian who had an affair with Webb Hubbell. I’ve seen nothing to take the mud slung at Perry out of that category.

There’s other critiques of Perry, of course (there’s an excellent summary here), but that’s to be expected with anybody who’s been in public office for that long. On ethics, for example, Perry’s records is wholly unremarkable. He hasn’t made a career as a reform-minded crusader like McCain or Palin, or pretended to, like Obama. Inevitably, he’s open to charges that his state government has sometimes favored his political and financial supporters. This is common to basically all successful politicians, and it’s entirely proper that they be kept in some fear of public criticism on the subject. But as all conservatives know, the only way to limit public corruption is to limit the role of government, especially in the economy – that’s why the Democrats will always have a larger systemic problem with corruption. Perry’s Texas experience, the polar opposite of Obama’s grounding in the all-encompassing Chicago machine, helps him understand this. We’ll hear more about the Texas Governorship being comparatively “weak,” and the legislature is even weaker…but that’s a good thing, as Perry pointed out in 2007:

The Texas Legislature meets 140 days every other year.

Would Texans consider having a full-time legislature like Pennsylvania’s 253-member General Assembly, which serves 12 million people, and where lawmakers are paid $73,000 a year, drive state-paid cars and collect generous pensions?

Forget about it, Perry says.

“There are people who always think, ‘Let’s have a full-time legislature.’ I happen to think that’s just asking for trouble. When you have a full-time legislature, they just feel pretty inclined to be doing something. So they are going to dream up new laws, new regulations and new statutes — and generally all of those cost money,” Perry said.

Perry will take his knocks. Put not your faith in princes – he’s no messiah, he’s a politician. But he’s a good one for these times.

Conclusion

I haven’t walked through Perry’s record in detail here, nor explained in full my reasons for discounting his opponents; there will be ample time for all that as the campaign unfolds. But I hope you’ll agree with me that Perry is precisely the kind of proven, experienced, responsible conservative leader that the GOP should be running in 2012, and take the time yourself to give his record (warts and all) a closer look.

Obama’s speech on jobs will be more of the same - The Kings speech writes itself.

2011-09-01T15:39:00.000-07:00

Obama’s speech on jobs will be more of the same - NYPOST.com

Get out the marshmallows and gather ’round the campfire, boys and girls, President Obama is about to give another speech. Whoopee.

OK, so the idea doesn’t exactly send a tingle up your leg or make you swoon with visions of Hope & Change. In that case, you don’t have to wait a minute longer for him to actually declare how he’ll create jobs. Here’s what he will say next week.

“Folks are hurtin’.”

“We have to invest in the future.”

“We need a balanced approach.” “My hope and expectation is that we can put country before party and get something done for the American people.”

The first three are boilerplate arguments for ever-more government spending and ever-higher taxes. Whatever else he says, that will be the heart of his “pivot” to jobs.

There’s nothing new in the approach because it’s exactly what he’s said and done since he took office. He probably calls for tax hikes in his sleep.

It’s the last phrase -- “put country before party” -- that is especially noteworthy and troubling.

Starting with his Midwest bus tour, the demand that Congress (read Republicans) “put country before party” has repeatedly popped up in his speeches, as it did Monday, when he introduced a new economic aide.

It’s a twist on another staple of his us-against-them rhetoric. Mostly, he’s aimed to divide America along class lines, with his nonstop references to “millionaires and billionaires.”

That was cynical enough, but the message behind the new talking point is darker and more ominous.

The inference that anybody who doesn’t agree with him is putting party before country is essentially an accusation that opponents are unpatriotic. It says they are pulling against America and, by logical extension, labels them as traitors.

This is rancid politics by any reasonable measure, and it reveals the president’s desperation. He sees the polls and knows the odds are rising that he’ll be a one-termer because he broke the bank on failed economic policies.

By landslide proportions, 55 percent of voters tell Gallup they disapprove of his job performance and 76 percent say the economy is getting worse. His signature issue, ObamaCare, now commands support from only 39 percent of the nation, the Kaiser Foundation says.

Equally telling, Americans for the first time view the federal government more negatively than any major business or industry, with only 17 percent having a positive view of Washington, Gallup reports. That’s below the oil and gas industry!

Yet even at this late date in his term, Obama has no new ideas on how to create jobs, nor is he willing to embrace the GOP push to cut spending, reform the tax code and trim the regulations strangling business growth. He is sticking with the same failed Big Government policies that got him and the nation to this downgraded moment.

He has largely given up on changing the substance of his economic and fiscal record before the election. White House deliberations reportedly focus not on what ideas would create jobs, but on how to frame the argument so he is not blamed for the failure.

It’s a game plan that hangs on impugning the integrity of any and all opponents. It’s pure character assassination, but, because he won’t change policies, cheap politics is all he has left.

As I have noted before, that’s not the kind of president he said he would be. But that’s the kind of president he is.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/king_speech_writes_itself_imKO03o3y8wfiI6u5yLytO#ixzz1Wk91xVdY

Arrogant Game Preview: Minnesota Golden Gophers

2011-09-01T13:21:00.000-07:00

http://lostangelesblog.wordpress.com/http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Perry, the GOP, and Cowboy Diplomacy

2011-09-01T10:53:00.001-07:00

Rick Perry’s dramatic entrance into the Republican presidential race has triggered within a few short weeks a remarkable amount of invective, clucking, and alarm on the part of leading critics. Perry, we are told in worried tones, cannot and must not win the presidency: he is too Texan, too Christian, too “extreme,” and altogether too provincial. Never mind that these concerns issue mainly from a Northeastern liberal-leaning commentariat that is amazingly inward-looking in its definition of worldly wisdom. The central fear seems to be that Perry is another George W. Bush – in a word, a cowboy.

It has been interesting to watch the word cowboy become a term of abuse, politically, over the last decade. Critics often described Bush’s foreign policy approach, in particular, as reckless, unthinking or bombastic – a case of “cowboy diplomacy.” My guess is that the vast majority of people employing this term have never met an actual cowboy. Real North American cowboys are often very deliberate and measured when they speak, but they do tend to have limited patience for being pushed around - a combination of qualities as useful in foreign policy as in life.

To be sure, President Obama is no “cowboy.” He instinctively scolds and shifts blame, splits every difference, appears peevish when criticized, views himself as a kind of international community organizer, and places tremendous faith in the power of endless talk - especially his own. Elite transatlantic liberal opinion continues to view this overall approach, self-referentially, as the height of sophistication, regardless of its practical failures. Many foreign governments however - whether friendly or otherwise - are less impressed, viewing it basically as a sign of weakness. Notice that Obama’s one undisputed international success, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, was achieved through an uncharacteristic reliance on aggressive interrogations and unilateral military action without permission from anybody. If a Republican president had engaged in this sort of act, no doubt we would have heard much more hand-wringing about the dangers of a rootin’-tootin’ approach to counter-terrorism. But then that’s cowboy diplomacy for you.

Here’s a crack at what the genuine version of cowboy diplomacy would look like: not reckless, but measured, backed up by strength, unwilling to tolerate insult, and ready to act with force and decision when necessary. So far as we can tell, this seems to be Rick Perry’s inclination. Searching through the Texas Governor’s statements on U.S. foreign policy, including his speech a few days ago to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, we find that he has suggested the following:

1. The United States should be thoughtful before undertaking military interventions…

2. …and similarly thoughtful before abandoning them.

3. President Obama’s exit timeline for Afghanistan risks undercutting military and political progress in that country against the Taliban.

4. The concept of nuclear abolition is completely unrealistic.

5. The supply of multilateral and legalistic pieties in world affairs tends to be much greater than the true demand for them.

6. The U.S. should support Israel against terrorism and stop trying to micromanage territorial revisions within the Middle East.

7. There is no need for an American president to strike an apologetic tone overseas.

8. A president should focus internationally on supporting America’s friends and defeating America’s adversaries.

9. “As the 10th anniversary of the attacks of 9-11 approach, we must renew our commitment to taking the fight to the enemy, wherever they are, before they strike at home.”

10. At the same time: the United States should not “fall subject to a foreign policy of military adventurism. We should only risk shedding American blood and spending American treasure when our vital interests are threatened.”

I’m not sure how all of the above suggestions play with Perry’s critics, but by my count that’s ten for ten. If this is cowboy diplomacy, let’s have more of it.

As it happens, Perry and other Republicans already have multiple good examples of past GOP presidents who both embodied and practiced authentic cowboy diplomacy. The two best models to work from are Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was a Sunbelt foreign policy hawk, comfortable with the use of force internationally. He pushed the Soviet Union into dramatic international concessions, weakening it irrevocably through a strategy of deliberate and relentless pressure across the board. At the same time, he was usually very careful about entangling the United States in direct, protracted, or half-hearted military interventions overseas. He obviously believed the U.S. system of government to be a model for the rest of the world, but his foreign policy centered on supporting America’s friends and opposing its enemies, above all else.

Theodore Roosevelt built up the U.S. Navy, seized control of the Panama Canal, and pre-empted European interventions within the Caribbean. Simultaneously - and contrary to his reputation as a bombastic Rough Rider - he behaved, once in the White House, with remarkable tact and care when it came to the exercise of U.S. power and diplomacy overseas. He worked to balance competing great powers against one another through skillful diplomacy, and refused to make strategic commitments that he could not keep. As president, he strengthened America’s international and military position while genuinely trying to avoid war. The exercise of such a firm but ultimately prudent foreign policy was all the more impressive in TR’s case, since it was sometimes in tension with his personally combative instincts. Plus, he gets extra credit in the annals of cowboy diplomacy for having worked as an honest-to-God cowhand in the Black Hills of Dakota.

Both TR and Reagan emanated a rock-solid belief in their country’s greatness, together with a willingness to protect America’s interests abroad by whatever means necessary. Both were also admirably shrewd and careful when it came to major decisions for war or peace. This is the genuine model of cowboy diplomacy, one in the best Republican traditions, and one that Perry seems to favor.

If Perry can describe his own distinct version of cowboy diplomacy, it will help both him and the country. It will also help the GOP. Certainly, the main focus of popular and political attention right now is on the economy, which under the circumstances is entirely appropriate. Still, this does not mean that Republican voters or even most tea party supporters are “isolationist,” as the press likes to suggest. The average GOP primary voter is increasingly skeptical of nation-building exercises abroad but nevertheless supportive of strong military defenses, core U.S. alliances, robust counter-terrorism, and American leadership as opposed to decline or defeat internationally. The candidate who strikes this exact balance and tone most convincingly on foreign policy and military issues will gain an edge in the upcoming primaries and lead Republicans in the right direction. A tough-minded yet deliberate approach to questions of military intervention will also stand Perry in good stead if he wins the nomination and faces Obama next fall. Specifically, it will help differentiate the Texas Governor from George W. Bush, while reassuring swing-state independent voters that Perry is the right kind of cowboy.

Perry has an excellent opportunity this month, in a number of televised debates between GOP presidential candidates, to clarify his foreign policy views so as to rally Republicans while undercutting his detractors. Critics who dismiss him as either a lightweight or unelectable are kidding themselves. Perry is a tough, shrewd, disciplined campaigner who has shown in multiple winning efforts that he can take a punch as well as deliver one. If the U.S. economy keeps sputtering, then a plausible Republican challenger for the White House will have a very good chance of unseating Obama – and Perry is entirely plausible. For over ten years he has successfully governed a state that is in itself the equivalent of a large, diverse, and prosperous nation. He is also a conservative, which is to say, he does not share the approved left-liberal assumptions about social issues, foreign policy, or the government’s proper role in the economy. Liberals have acquired a very boring habit of characterizing people who don’t share their precise assumptions as “extreme.” But this is a big country, and voters will draw their own conclusions about the various candidates, fully aware of regional and ideological biases within the coastal chattering class. Perry’s inclination in the face of baseless attacks appears to be the right one in any case: grin, don’t flinch, and turn the challenge back around. If critics want to call Perry a cowboy, he should respond just like the hero did in Owen Wister’s classic Western, The Virginian:

“When you call me that, smile.”

Colin Dueck is associate professor of public and international affairs at George Mason University, and the author of the forthcoming book Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II (Princeton, October 2010).

Rep. King promises to reshape security after critical 9/11 report - TheHill.com

2011-09-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

Rep. King promises to reshape security after critical 9/11 report - TheHill.com

Obama and the Burden of Exceptionalism

2011-09-01T08:42:00.001-07:00

By SHELBY STEELE

If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.

Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America's exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America's greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.

Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.

Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his "leading from behind" profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his "hope and change" campaign slogan came to look like the "hope" of overcoming American exceptionalism and "change" away from it.

So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.

View Full Image
steele
Chad Crowe
steele
steele

But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America's bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?

American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.

Yet today America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall. Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens. The entire world comes to our door when there is real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands—even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record.

At home the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision. Individual initiative and individual responsibility—the very engines of our exceptionalism—now carry a stigma of hypocrisy. For centuries America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women. So in liberal quarters today—where historical shames are made to define the present—these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era. Talk of "merit" or "a competition of excellence" in the admissions office of any Ivy League university today, and then stand by for the howls of incredulous laughter.

Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There's a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.

So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.

But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. (Think of England or France after empire.) To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.

Since the '60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.

America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?

As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.

Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).

Man United Posts Strong Earnings Ahead of IPO

2011-09-01T08:30:00.001-07:00

By MARIETTA CAUCHI and NISHA GOPALAN

LONDON—Manchester United on Thursday posted a strong set of earnings ahead of its initial public offering in Singapore, recording a 9.6% rise in full-year net profit and an 18% reduction in net debt.

The results will boost the English soccer club, which plans to raise $1 billion in an IPO set for October, with proceeds going toward expanding the club's Asia business, as well as paying down club debt.

Manchester United said that earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization for the year to June 30 were £110.9 million ($180.2 million), compared with £101.2 million last year.

The club also posted record revenue of £331.4 million, up £45 million in 2010 on the back of increased activity from sponsorship deals, attendance and broadcasting.

Over the year, Manchester United became English Premier League champions, reached the final of the European Champions League and the semi-finals of the FA Cup, extending its run of matches and boosting match revenue.

Taken private by U.S. tycoon Malcolm Glazer in 2005 in a deal worth £790 million, Manchester United has struggled to service the £700 million debt taken on to finance the leveraged buyout.

However, Thursday it said that net debt had been cut to £308.3 million, from GBP376.9 million last year and that its cash balance was £150.6 million.

Soccer has a huge domestic and international profile with top-class clubs like Manchester United continuing to generate spectacular revenue on the back of attendance, broadcasting and merchandising sales. Asia, in particular, is seen as a high-growth market for the club, which like other international companies wants to tap into increasingly wealthy consumers and bullish investors.

Manchester United has in excess of 100 million fans in Southeast Asia and is boosting commercial ties in the region, most recently signing a sponsorship deal with Honda Motor Co.

Having originally planned to list in Hong Kong, Manchester United switched to Singapore in June to take advantage of the dual-share listing structure that is available, people familiar with the matter have said.

A two-tier share structure, one with voting rights and one without, enables its owners to effectively retain control of the team. It has raised concerns about corporate governance at the club, which is owned by the Glazer family, headed by patriarch Malcolm Glazer. The family is also owner of the National Football League's Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Credit Suisse Group has been mandated as sole global coordinator and bookrunner on the IPO, which is expected to involve a sale of around 25%, valuing the whole company at $4 billion.

Singapore regulations stipulate that at least 12% of a listed company must be in public hands. Hong Kong requires 25%, although it gives companies waivers in certain cases.

Nonvoting preference shares aren't counted as part of the public float, and investors buying into the IPO will have to buy equal numbers of voting and nonvoting shares, two people familiar with the deal said.

Singapore Exchange Chief Executive Magnus Bocker promised an approval of four weeks for the IPO, which was filed with the exchange Aug. 18, essentially putting the club on the fast-track route. Singapore IPOs usually take up to 12 weeks to get a green light for launch.

The impact of Gen. David Petraeus, in four takes

2011-08-31T12:33:00.000-07:00

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the most recognized military officer of his generation, retires from the Army today after roughly four decades in uniform and a career like no other.

With that in mind, we invited four defense experts to reflect on his record. Some of them have known the general up close, others from afar. To each the question was the same: What is his legacy and how has he shaped the U.S. armed forces?

For some, Petraeus will be remembered as the model statesman-soldier — commander of two wars launched by the United States and chief intellectual author of a counterinsurgency doctrine that advances American interests. But for others, Petraeus will be remembered less for his remarkable accomplishments — which are almost universally admired — than for his association with a U.S. foreign policy that, in their view, is costly, misguided and not always effective.

In other words, the story of Gen. David Petraeus is in many ways the story of America’s wars.

The experts’ submissions — mini-essays of sorts — are below.

Celeste Ward Gventer on separating the myth from the man

Michael O’Hanlon on an overachieving superstar

Christopher A. Preble on the chief strategist for unnecessary wars

John Nagl on a soldier, teacher, mentor and commander

Celeste Ward Gventer, associate director at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas

Nearly 50 years ago, historian Daniel J. Boorstin argued in an eerily prophetic book that authentic experiences in American life were increasingly being supplanted by manufactured images and “pseudo-events.” Boorstin lamented this “age of contrivance,” in which heroes are replaced by celebrities and American ideals by images.

In this environment it is difficult to separate the man Gen. Petraeus, who doubtless possesses many virtues and has accomplished much, from the constructed totem of the same name. Over the last half-decade, reporters and commentators have seemed to know no bounds in gushing over the general’s intellectual brilliance, physical prowess and even his ability to perform miracles, allegedly waking a young soldier from a coma. As one adoring article put it, “General Petraeus: Bringing Myth Back to the Military.”

Myths provide comfort and solidarity in times of difficulty, but they also mask hard realities and choices that we might better face. The widely repeated cavalry tale that figuratively places Gen. Petraeus on horseback, riding with counterinsurgency manual in hand to snatch victory in Iraq from the jaws of defeat, has allowed the public and policymakers to sidestep the most important questions about the war in Iraq, as well as the one in Afghanistan.

What is the real strategic payoff to the United States from these conflicts? What do these wars tell us about U.S. interventions abroad? What are America’s fundamental national security interests, the best means to pursue them, and at what cost?

Our myths have swaddled these hard questions in comfortable homilies and snug maxims, assuring us that there is a formula for success: The right general plus the right manual equals “victory.” They also place extravagant expectations on human beings who possess virtues and vices, experience moments of success and failure, and who act both brilliantly and foolishly. Neither the public nor the object of its acclaim is well served.

Gen. Petraeus is clearly an exceptional person and a fine military officer who will continue to serve his country honorably. But perhaps even he would agree that we must separate the man from the lore, and face head-on the strategic challenges before us.

As Boorstin wrote in the preface to his book, “The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream,” dispelling the “thicket of unreality” we have created “will not give us the power to conquer the real enemies of the real world ... [b]ut it may help us discover that we cannot make the world in our image.”

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

Bob Costas once said about the greatest basketball player ever to live that “Michael Jordan is not just a superstar, he’s an overachieving superstar.” That is the best way I can describe Gen. Petraeus, a good friend and former graduate school classmate.

What Costas meant, of course, was that in addition to being perhaps the most gifted player ever to step on the court, Jordan also wanted to succeed more than almost anyone else around. Perhaps there were a handful of other players who were equally tenacious, but not more than that, and the combination of talent with drive made Jordan one of a kind.

It is hard to capture a whole career in a short essay, and to add new insights about a public figure who has been so closely watched and avidly studied for half a decade. But perhaps the best thing I can add to the commentary about Petraeus is this: He is most striking to me for his sheer doggedness, his consistency and his positive energy.

Some might wonder how he could be so brilliant as to have figured out Iraq and made the “surge” work. Yes, he is brilliant. But he didn’t spend a lot of time wondering whether the Sunni Awakening, or the Sadr militia’s ceasefire, or the buildup in Iraqi forces, or the greater cooperation from Prime Minister Maliki and a new crop of subordinate leaders, or the increase in U.S. forces together with improved military tactics was the key to success, above all the others. Many of us back home debated such things.

P4, as he is often known, didn’t waste time on such matters. He just tried to make all of the above factors work as well as they could, all the time, with incessant energy and effort.

Petraeus also empowered subordinates. He has the attention to detail of a micromanager, but in fact he is not a micromanager. He encouraged junior officers and others in the field to be “pentathletes,” handling everything from military tactics to unit leadership to political relations with Iraqis and later Afghans with élan and initiative.

If we succeeded as a nation, particularly in Iraq, it is largely because he encouraged and helped those under his command to succeed.

Christopher A. Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute

Gen. David Petraeus has served honorably, and well, for roughly four decades, and he is generally recognized as one of the finest officers of his generation.

In contemplating his legacy and how it has shaped the force, two key episodes stand out: his initial doubts about the Iraq invasion and his eventual enthusiasm for more Iraq-style nation-building missions as reflected in the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine that bears his imprimatur.

It is easy to forget that Gen. Petraeus was first introduced to millions of Americans long before he took command in Iraq. As he prepared to lead the 101st Airborne Division across the border separating Kuwait from Iraq in March 2003, then-Maj. Gen. David Petraeus turned to Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson and asked quizzically, “Tell me how this ends.”

It was a good question because it leads to others, most of which the Bush administration failed to ask, let alone answer. What political end is our invasion supposed to achieve? Does that end advance U.S. security? Can we accomplish it at reasonable cost?

Our experience in Iraq shows that achieving even a modicum of stability exacts a cost to our security far greater than its benefit. Among the most important lessons drawn from the war in Iraq is that we should leave the problem of repairing weak and failing states to the people living in them. But Washington came mostly to a different conclusion, and for that David Petraeus deserves much of the credit or the blame, depending upon one’s perspective.

Rather than continuing to ask how a particular war was likely to end, and therefore testing the proposition that it was worth fighting in the first place, Petraeus perfected the art of fighting unnecessary wars. If Iraq was likely to end badly, the solution was better planning, more money and more time. And if Iraq ultimately could be made to work, then the model could be replicated elsewhere. Armed nation-building was an often thankless task, but Petraeus concluded that it was a vital one, and therefore one that the Army and Marine Corps must learn and perfect. This required more boots on the ground, and that the troops stay in country longer.

But the effort to perfect our ability to defeat insurgencies and order chaotic states has prevented us from noting how rarely these skills are needed.

I hope that Gen. Petraeus’s legacy leads to fewer foreign wars, and reflects the wisdom and caution that he revealed in a private moment before the start of the Iraq war. I worry that the opposite will be true, and that our brave men and women in uniform, following the doctrine that Petraeus drafted and promulgated, will fight more wars, in more places, but with precious little to show for it.

John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security

As the remarkable Army career of Gen. David Petraeus draws to a close, it is clear that he has affected the lives of countless individuals, reshaped the U.S. Army and changed the course of history.

Even before Petraeus captured national attention, he was known as a legendary professor at West Point, finishing his doctoral dissertation in two years while teaching full time and putting enormous efforts into mentoring young cadets. At the time, I was a cadet at West Point, and Petraeus was among my mentors. When I later returned to West Point to teach in a cohort of some 30 Army officers, half of them seemed to have interacted with Col. Petraeus.

Petraeus, of course, has gained recognition less for what he has done in the classroom than on the battlefield. In Iraq, sooner than most, he recognized that the hard part would come after Saddam fell, and when his suspicions of postwar chaos were confirmed, he was assigned the thankless task of rebuilding the Iraqi army, giving his command the moniker “Phoenix” to symbolize an army — and a country — rising from the ashes.

After getting the Iraqi army on its feet (if somewhat unsteadily), Lt. Gen. Petraeus was sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in what was widely seen as exile for an officer whose profile was bigger than was good for him. He chose to see the assignment as a chance to reshape the way the Army thought about counterinsurgency, then still a bad word in the Pentagon. Later, as commander of Multi-National Command-Iraq during that war’s darkest hour, he implemented his doctrine.

I was asked at the time whether I thought it was too late for counterinsurgency to work in Iraq. I estimated the chances of success at one in six, but concluded, “If there’s a man on the planet who can make it work, it’s Petraeus.”

After turning the tide in Iraq, Petraeus was called to take command of another theater of war, replacing Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan. Not hesitating to take a demotion from his current position at CENTCOM, and without informing his wife that he was going back to war, Petraeus demonstrated the kind of respect for civilian authority that is the essence of the United States Army.

Although it is too soon to say Petraeus was able to turn the tide in Afghanistan, it seems fair to suggest that he deserves to be mentioned with Grant and Eisenhower as American generals who have commanded successfully in two theaters of war.

By Jason Ukman | 10:15 AM ET, 08/31/2011

Vindicating Capitalism: The Real History of the Standard Oil Company (Part III: The Missing Context of Standard’s Rise to Supremacy)

2011-08-31T09:19:00.000-07:00

The 1870s was a decade of gigantic growth for the Standard Oil Company. In 1870, it was refining fifteen hundred barrels per day—a huge amount for the time. By January 1871, it had achieved a 10 percent market share, making it the largest player in the industry. By 1873, it had one-third of the market share, was refining ten thousand barrels a day and had acquired twenty-one of the twenty-six other firms in Cleveland. By the end of the decade, it had achieved a 90 percent market share.

Such figures are used as ammunition by those who believe in the dangers of acquisitions and high market share. These critics believe that Standard’s growth and its ability to acquire so many companies so quickly “must have” come from some sort of “anticompetitive” misconduct—and they point to Standard Oil’s participation in two cartels during the early 1870s as evidence of Rockefeller’s market malice.

But the growing success of Standard did not flow from these attempted cartels—neither of which Standard initiated, and both of which failed miserably in very short order—but from the company’s enormous productive superiority to its competitors, and from the market conditions whose groundwork had been laid in the 1860s. Without understanding these conditions, one cannot understand Rockefeller’s exceptionally rapid rise.

Recall that in 1870 kerosene cost twenty-six cents a gallon, while three-fourths of the refining industry was losing money. A major cause of this was that refining capacity was at 12 million barrels a year, while there were only 5 million barrels to refine,46 a disparity that had an upward effect on the price of the crude that refiners purchased—and a downward effect on the price of the refined oil they sold.

Rationalizing Surplus Capacity

On November 8, 1871, a writer for the Titusville Herald estimated that “at present rates the loss to the refiner, on the average, is seventy-five cents per barrel.”47 Rockefeller’s firm, which was engineered to drastically lower production costs, could profit with such prices; few other firms could.

Even if there had not been a major excess of refining capacity, most of the refiners in America would have been unable to survive without drastically transforming their businesses. Rockefeller had raised the industry bar, and was expanding; anyone who hoped to compete with him would have to run a refining operation of comparable scale and efficiency.

Still, the excess capacity exacerbated the trouble for the lesser refiners—many of whom further exacerbated their own trouble by refusing to close or sell their failing businesses. In 1870, the Pittsburgh Evening Chronicle described the “very discouraging” tendency of the industry to increase refining capacity “ad infinitum” even during difficult times.48 One projection in 1871 put the rate of expansion at four thousand barrels per day.49

Refiners hoped that the old prices would come back. But the harsh reality for those refiners was that they could return to profitability only if they could restructure their businesses as modern, technological enterprises with the economies of scale on the order of those achieved by Standard. This reality became increasingly apparent over the decade as prices dropped from 26 cents a gallon in 1870, to 22 cents in 1872, to 10 cents in 1874.50

Trying Cartels

The failing refiners were neither the first nor the last businesses to be in such a situation. And, like many before and after them, they tried to solve their problems via cartels: agreements among producers to artificially reduce their production in order to artificially raise their prices.

Rockefeller, hoping for stability in prices and an end to the irrationality of others refining beyond their means, joined and supported two cartels. This move was disastrous—the worst of Rockefeller’s career.

Cartels are generally viewed as evil, destructive schemes because they are overt attempts by a group of businesses to increase revenues by raising consumers’ prices across an industry. In and of itself, however, seeking higher prices for one’s products is not evil; it is good. The problem with cartels is not that they seek higher profits, but that they shortsightedly attempt to generate them by non-productive means. So long as the economic freedom to offer competing or substitute products exists—as should be the case—such a scheme is bound to fail.

Cartels are more accurately viewed as ineffectual than evil. Cutting off supply in order to effect higher profits rewards those who do not participate in the scheme (as well as cheaters within the cartel) with the opportunity to sell more of their own products at inflated prices. And to attempt a cartel is to invite a boycott and long-term alienation from one’s customers. These truths were borne out by both the South Improvement Company (SIC) scheme and the Pittsburgh Plan.

South Improvement Company The Pennsylvania Railroad and its infamous leader, Tom Scott, a master manipulator of the Pennsylvania legislature, initiated the South Improvement Company (SIC) cartel. Railroads, like oil refiners, were struggling financially; they too had overbuilt given the market. Having less traffic than they had anticipated, they sought to solve the problem by charging above-market prices.

Here is the essence of their plan: The railroads would more than double the rates for everyone outside the cartel, including oil producers, to either bring all refiners into the SIC or drive them out of business. In turn, SIC refiners, which could constitute virtually all the refiners on the market, would impose strict limits on their output in order to raise prices. It seemed to be a “win-win” plan: The railroads would get higher rates and more revenue, and SIC refiners would raise prices and start profiting again.

This whole scheme, however, was delusional. For one, it presumed that the oil producers would accept catastrophic rate increases. They did not.

The oil producers—who were also the railroads’ consumers and the refineries’ suppliers—retaliated by placing an embargo on refineries associated with the South Improvement Company. The proposed rate increases were so dramatic and arbitrary that producers were strongly committed to the embargo—and it worked, cutting off Standard’s operations while benefiting those who did not participate. Writes Charles Morris in The Tycoons, “By early March, [1872] the Standard was effectively out of business, and up to 5,000 Cleveland refinery workers were laid off. . . . [In early April] the triumphant producers announced the end of their embargo.”51 The South Improvement Company never collected a rebate.

So much for Standard’s and the SIC’s “monopoly power.”

Pittsburgh Plan The other cartel in which Standard participated, the Pittsburgh Plan, was an agreement between oil producers and refiners to inflate their respective prices. While the 1870s began with high crude prices due to low crude supply and excess refinery capacity, a series of gushers soon reduced the price of crude to about $3.50 a barrel. Oil producers wanted to reverse this trend. Again, the idea was to artificially restrict production, raise prices, and reap the profits while competitors and consumers idly complied. The participants agreed that refiners would buy oil at the premium price of $5 a barrel (in some cases $4) so long as the producers substantially limited their production. Refineries, also, would limit production to raise their prices. The deal was wildly illogical; part of it stipulated that producers in the Oil Regions would simply cease new drilling for six months.

The plan dissolved in short order. Producers outside the cartel did not play their role of not trying to make a profit; instead, they expanded their production to make money—as did cartel members once this started happening. Prices fell—indeed, they fell immediately to the market rate, $3.25; within two months, following more crude discoveries, prices fell again, down to $2.52

Cartels and Free Markets

Historians try to outdo one another in denouncing the oil cartels as immoral. But given the desperation of many in the industry, and the relatively primitive understanding of how such arrangements pan out, it is more valuable to learn from the incidents, to gain a better understanding of the nature of cartels and other attempts to control markets under economic freedom.

Despite a huge percentage of refiners trying collectively to control market prices, they could not do so—because they had no means of forcing consumers to pay their prices or of forcing other producers not to compete by offering lower prices. The only thing they could control was their own production and whether it was the best it could be. Before the cartels, Rockefeller had relied solely on stellar production and efficiency to achieve great success; his participation in the cartels brought him failure and ire and was antithetical to his fundamental goal of expanding production.

In the wake of the South Improvement Company fiasco, Rockefeller claimed that he had never believed the cartel would work and that he had participated in it merely to show failing refiners that the only solution to their problems was to sell their businesses to him. Given his company’s prominent role in the SIC, this is likely overstated. But it is undeniable that while planning the cartel, Rockefeller began an aggressive policy of acquisition and improvement that continued throughout the decade.

Consolidation: 10 to 90 in Eight Years

Rockefeller had several motives for acquiring competitors. First, other refineries had talent and assets that he wanted—including facilities that produced not only kerosene, but a full range of petroleum products. Second, he wanted to eliminate the industry’s excess refining capacity and its accompanying instability as soon as possible, rather than ride out the storm as the other ships sank.

Rockefeller made his first acquisition in December 1871. He proposed a buyout to Oliver Payne of Clark, Payne & Company, which was his biggest competitor in Cleveland (and which featured the same Clark family that initially had been involved in business with Rockefeller). Payne, suffering from the depressive industry conditions and without much hope of timely relief, was open to the possibility of selling.

The decisive moment in the negotiations came when Rockefeller showed Payne Standard’s books. Payne was “thunderstruck” by how much profit the company was making under conditions in which others were flailing.53Rockefeller bought the company for $400,000 (a “goodwill” premium of $150,000 more than its then current market value).

After acquiring Clark, Payne & Company, Rockefeller increased his company’s capitalization to $3.5 million and went on an acquisition spree—later dubbed “The Conquest of Cleveland.” By the end of March 1872, he had proposed to buy out all of the other refiners in Cleveland, and twenty-one of twenty-six had already agreed. During 1872, Rockefeller also bought several refineries in New York, a crucial port, at which point he owned 25 percent of the refining capacity there.54

According to many analysts, the rapidity of acquisition “proves” that Rockefeller was involved in devious activities. But it proves nothing of the sort. The basic reason so many sold was that Rockefeller’s propositions made economic sense; if the second leading refiner in Cleveland was “thunderstruck” by the superiority of Standard’s efficiency, imagine the relative economic positions of the smaller, even less efficient refiners.

Another common view is that the “threat” of the proposed South Improvement Company frightened Cleveland refiners into selling to Rockefeller. But, if anything, as has been shown, the SIC provided incentive for refineries to remain independent.

A better explanation of why so many sold to Rockefeller is that they were eager to be bought out; in fact, a problem later surfaced with frauds trying to set up new refineries just to be bought out by Rockefeller. Of course, it took only a handful of acquisition targets, resentful of a market that had superseded them, to make a “devastating exposé” and gain a place in the anti-capitalist canon.

What if a company Rockefeller wanted to buy was not willing to sell? Accounts differ, but one plausible account is that he gave the competitor “a good sweating” (an expression attributed to Flagler) by lowering prices to a point where Standard remained profitable but the competitor would go out of business quickly. This practice is labeled “predatory pricing”—but it is no such thing. If predatory pricing is taken to mean lowering one’s prices below cost to drive a competitor out of business—and then raising those prices to artificially high levels once the competitor has been eliminated—then Rockefeller did not engage in “predatory pricing,” at least not to any significant extent.

If he had tried, he would have experienced the fact that, like cartels, this form of attempting to profit through unproductive measures fails. In general, large companies that attempt to profit by this means find that they lose money at alarming rates because they are selling more units at a loss than their “prey” is selling. If they do manage to destroy an existing company, they have weakened themselves in the process, thus providing an opportunity for more substantial, more able competitors to enter the market.

‘Predatory’ Pricing Revisited

Nothing is inherently wrong—either economically or morally—with temporarily selling at a loss in order to eliminate a rickety competitor. And the phrase “predatory pricing” is a misnomer in any event, because no force is involved in the practice of selling at a loss. But Standard Oil did not need to employ such measures to make its acquisitions. The company was so superior in its efficiency and economies of scale that it could price its product at a level at which it could profit but its competitors could not.

A study by John McGee published in 1958 shows that Standard generally did not lower prices below cost and take a loss; rather, it opted for temporarily smaller gains to demonstrate to unsustainable competitors that they were, indeed, unsustainable and would do well to join Standard and thrive.55 Here is Rockefeller’s description of how competitors came to see the situation:

The point is, that after awhile, when the people, or, at least, the intelligent, saw that we were not crushing or oppressing anybody, they began to listen to our suggestion for a pleasing meeting at which we could quietly talk over conditions and show them the advantage of entering our organizations. One after another they joined us.56

Scale Economies

Rockefeller used the Conquest of Cleveland to create the most impressive refining concern ever. He took twenty-four refineries and turned them into six state-of-the art facilities, selling the unusable parts for scrap. These refineries constituted a “complete” refining operation, which produced not only kerosene but several profitable by-products.

In 1873, these refineries produced 10,000 barrels a day.57 At this rate, which would only grow, Rockefeller would create nationwide markets for paraffin wax, petroleum jelly, chewing gum, various medicinal products (later found to be of dubious value), fuel oil, and many other products.

In answering a question about Lloyd’s characterization of him, Rockefeller contrasted Standard with other refiners: “Here were these refiners, who bought crude oil, distilled it, purified it with sulphuric acid, and sold the kerosene. We did that, too; but we did fifty—yes, fifty—other things beside, and made a profit from each one.”

And: “. . . every one of these articles I have named to you represents a separate industry founded on crude petroleum. And we made a good profit from each industry. Yet this ‘historian,’ Lloyd, cannot see that we did anything but make kerosene and get rebates and ‘oppress’ somebody.”58

In 1873, Rockefeller began vertically integrating the company to include the acquisition of gathering pipelines for crude oil. These pipelines connected new oil wells to transportation hubs. Managing these with its typical excellence, Standard made its stream of incoming oil more reliable and enabled drillers to quickly find a place to put newfound oil instead of letting it go to waste in an uncontrolled gusher.

An Integrated Giant

Standard was no longer just a kerosene company; it was a full-fledged, integrated oil-refining giant. And, after the Conquest of Cleveland in 1873, Rockefeller, age thirty-three, was still just beginning.

Starting in 1874, Rockefeller focused on acquiring competitors in the rest of the country. He began, as he had in Cleveland, with the major players: Charles Pratt in New York; Atlantic Refining in Philadelphia; and Lockhart, Waring, and Frew in Pittsburgh. He bought out the largest refiners in the Oil Regions, including the refinery of a man named John Archbold, who later became president of Standard when Rockefeller retired.

Rockefeller’s operation was so superior to others in every facet—from its marketing efforts, to its access to supplies of crude, to its ability to generate and profitably sell dozens of by-products—that the acquisitions occurred with relative ease, even when he was acquiring his most sophisticated competitors. Charles Morris writes of buying out the Warden interests in Atlantic Refining: “Warden’s son recalled that his father was invited to examine the Standard’s books and was astonished at its profitability, just as Oliver Payne had been in Cleveland a few years before.”59

The most difficult acquisitions for Rockefeller were in Pennsylvania. The difficulties were not initiated by the refiners but by the Pennsylvania Railroad and its subsidiary, the Empire Transportation Company (ETC).

ETC owned extensive gathering pipelines and tank cars in the region, and it attempted to freeze Standard out of the area and acquire a nationwide refining victory of its own by—of all things—lowering its prices and making transportation nearly free for its refiners. This attempt ended in disaster. Rockefeller, who had provided the Pennsylvania with two-thirds of its freight, first tried to convince the Pennsylvania’s Tom Scott to stop his scheme.

When that failed, he stopped shipping on the railroad and redirected his domestic and international traffic elsewhere. The Pennsylvania Railroad started hemorrhaging money and, facing terrified shareholders, Scott not only ended the scheme, but he sold ETC to Standard, making Standard’s onloading and offloading transportation network that much more extensive and efficient.

At this point, Rockefeller had earned a 90 percent market share—a 90 percent that was far different in nature than what 90 percent in 1870 would have meant. Rockefeller owned not a grab bag of mediocre operations, but an integrated, coordinated group of facilities in Cleveland, New York, Baltimore, and Pennsylvania, the likes of which had never been imagined. Near the end of the 1870s, he ran, to use the apt cliché, a well-oiled machine.

Standard housed millions of barrels of crude in its storage facilities, transported that crude to its refineries by gathering line and tank car, extracted every ounce of value from that crude using its state-of-the-art refining technologies, and shipped the myriad resulting petroleum products to Standard’s export facilities in New York—where its marketing experts distributed Standard products to every nook and cranny of the world.

Rockefeller oversaw all of this in conjunction with a team of great business minds (many of whom were obtained through the acquisitions) that understood every facet of the domestic and international oil market and that was always expanding and adjusting operations to meet demand.

Efficiency Unbound

It is important to note that as big as Standard was becoming, its leader’s obsession with efficiency remained unabated. Rockefeller had a rare ability to conceive and execute a grand vision for the future, while minding every detail of the present. A story told by Ron Chernow in Titan illustrates this well:

In the early 1870s, Rockefeller inspected a Standard plant in New York City that filled and sealed five-gallon tin cans of kerosene for export. After watching a machine solder caps to the cans, he asked the resident expert: “How many drops of solder do you use on each can?” “Forty,” the man replied. “Have you ever tried thirty-eight?” Rockefeller asked. “No? Would you mind having some sealed with thirty-eight and let me know?”

When thirty-eight drops were applied, a small percentage of cans leaked—but none at thirty-nine. Hence, thirty-nine drops of solder became the new standard instituted at all Standard Oil refineries. “That one drop of solder,” said Rockefeller, still smiling in retirement, “saved” $2,500 the first year; but the export business kept on increasing after that and doubled, quadrupled—became immensely greater than it was then; and the saving has gone steadily along, one drop on each can and has amounted since to many hundreds of thousands of dollars.60

Rockefeller and his firm were as active-minded and vigilant as could be, but in the late 1870s one development in the industry took it by surprise: long-distance pipelines.

A group of entrepreneurs successfully started the Tidewater Company, the first long-distance pipeline. This posed an immediate threat to the railroads’ oil transportation revenue, because pipelines are a far more efficient, less expensive means of transporting oil. With sufficiently thick or plentiful pipelines, enormous amounts of oil can be shipped at relatively low cost twenty-four hours a day.

Pipelining: National Transit Company

Initially, Rockefeller, the allegedly invincible “monopolist,” aided the railroads in fighting Tidewater (including using commonly-practiced political tactics that should have been beneath him) but failed. Realizing the superiority of pipelines, he entered the pipeline business in full-force himself, creating the National Transit Company.

Describing Rockefeller’s excellent pipeline practices, oil historian Robert L. Bradley Jr. writes:

Right-of-way was obtained by dollars, not legal force. Pipe was laid deep for permanence, and only the best equipment was used to minimize leakage. Storage records reflected “accuracy and integrity.” Innovative tank design reduced leakage and evaporation to benefit all parties. Fire-preventions reflected “systematic administration.” The pricing strategy was to prevent entry by keeping rates low. While these business successes may not have benefited certain competitors, they benefited customers and consumers of the final products.61

Free-Market ‘Monopolist’

By 1879, Rockefeller was the consummate “monopolist,” “controlling” some 90 percent of the refining market.

According to antitrust theory, when one “controls” nearly an entire market, he can restrict output and force consumers to pay artificially high prices. Yet output had quadrupled from 1870 to 1880. And as for consumer prices, recall that in 1870 kerosene cost twenty-six cents per gallon and was bankrupting much of the industry; by 1880, Standard Oil was phenomenally profitable, and kerosene cost nine cents per gallon.62

It had revolutionized the method of producing refined oil, bringing about an explosion of productivity, profit, and improvement to human life. It had shrunk the cost of light by a factor of 30, thereby adding hours to the days of millions around the world. This is the story Henry Lloyd and Ida Tarbell should have told.

The Real History of the Standard Oil Company (Part II: The Phenom)

2011-08-31T09:17:00.000-07:00

The Standard story begins during the U.S. Civil War. In 1863, the first railroad line was built connecting the city of Cleveland to the Oil Regions in Pennsylvania, where virtually all American oil came from. Clevelanders quickly took the opportunity to refine oil—as had the residents of the Oil Regions, Pittsburgh, New York, and Baltimore. Cleveland had the disadvantage of being one hundred miles22 from the oil fields but the advantage of having far cheaper prices for materials and land (Oil Regions real estate had become extremely expensive), plus proximity to the Erie Canal for shipping.23

John D. Changes Industry

At this time, Rockefeller was running a successful merchant business with his partner, Maurice Clark, when a local man named Samuel Andrews approached the two. A talented amateur chemist, Andrews sought their investment in a refinery.

After investigating the industry, Rockefeller convinced Clark that they should invest four thousand dollars.24 Rockefeller was attracted to the substantial—and then stable—profits of the refining industry, in contrast to the production industry, which alternated between incredible booms and busts. (When producers struck a “gusher,” whole towns were built up to the height of 1860s luxury; when they dried up, those towns faded into abject poverty.) He was not, however, impressed with the efficiency with which refiners ran their operations. He believed he could do better.

And he did—immediately. Instead of setting up a shanty refinery, Rockefeller invested enough to create the largest refinery in Cleveland: Excelsior Works. From the beginning, he encouraged Andrews to expand and improve the refinery, which soon produced 505 barrels a day,25 as compared to some refineries in the Oil Regions that produced as few as five barrels a day.26

Additionally, in a highly profitable act of foresight, Rockefeller carefully bought the land for his refinery in a place from which it would be easy to ship by railroad and by water, thus putting shippers in competition for his business; his competitors simply placed their refineries near the new Cleveland rail line and took for granted that it would be their means of transportation.27

A Real Businessman

Rockefeller’s business background made him well-suited to run a highly efficient firm. His first interest in business had been accounting—the art of measuring profit and loss (i.e., economic efficiency). Rockefeller’s first job had been as an assistant bookkeeper, and for his entire career he revered the practice of careful financial record-keeping.

“For Rockefeller,” writes Ron Chernow, “ledgers were sacred books that guided decisions and saved one from fallible emotion. They gauged performance, exposed fraud, and ferreted out hidden inefficiencies.”28

Rockefeller was hardly the only man in the refining industry with a background in accounting or a concern with efficiency. But he was distinguished in this regard by his degree of focus on applying good accounting practices to his new business. Rockefeller, from a young age, exhibited an obsessive, laser-like concentration on whatever he chose as his purpose. At age sixteen he landed an accounting job after six weeks of repeated visits to top firms, shrugging off rejections until he finally convinced one of them, Hewitt and Tuttle, to hire him.29

Applied to the task of minimizing costs and maximizing revenues in his refining operation, Rockefeller’s focus brought Standard Oil phenomenal success.

While other refiners took any given business cost for granted—including the cost of barrels and the cost of crude—Rockefeller put himself and those who worked for him to the task of discovering ways to lower every cost while continuously seeking additional sources of revenue.

Consider the cost of transporting oil in barrels. Barrels were a major expense for everyone in the industry, and barrel makers were notoriously unreliable when it came to delivering barrels on time. Rockefeller at once slashed his costs and solved this reliability problem by having his firm manufacture its own barrels. He purchased forest land, had laborers cut wood, and—in a crucial innovation—had the wood dried in a kiln before using it to transport kerosene. (Others used green wood barrels, which were far heavier and thus more expensive to transport.)

With these and other innovations, Rockefeller’s barrel costs dropped from $2.50 a barrel to less than $1 a barrel—and he always had barrels when he needed them.30

More Cost-Cutting

Rockefeller further lowered his costs by eliminating the use of barrels altogether in receiving crude oil (barrels would remain in use for shipping refined oil to customers for some time). He did so by investing in “tank cars”—railroad cars fitted with giant tanks—shortly after they came on the market in 1865. By 1869, he owned seventy-eight of them, yielding huge cost savings over his competitors.31

Or consider the cost of buying crude, which most people took as entirely dependent upon current market prices. One way in which he cut this cost was by employing his own purchasing agents, which eliminated the need for paying “jobbers” (purchasing middlemen). A shrewd negotiator, Rockefeller trained his purchasing agents to obtain the best possible prices.

Further saving money and improving his negotiating position, Rockefeller built large storage facilities to keep crude in reserve, so that he would not have to pay exorbitant prices in the event of a spike in its price. Accordingly, his purchasing agents developed comprehensive, constantly updated knowledge of the industry so that they could determine the most opportune times to purchase crude.

These improvements, along with many others, reflected a practice that characterized Rockefeller’s firm for his thirty-five years at the helm: vertical integration—incorporating into a company functions that it had previously paid others to do. Time after time, Rockefeller found that, given his and his subordinates’ talent and innovative spirit, many facets of the business could be done more cheaply if his firm undertook them itself.

Rockefeller also lowered costs in the refining process itself. One particularly innovative form of cost-cutting in which he engaged was self-insurance against fires. In the early refining industry, the danger of fire was omnipresent. Even in the 1870s, when safety improved significantly, premiums “varied from 25 per cent down to 5 per cent of valuation. . . .”32 Rockefeller determined that he could save money by self-insuring. He regularly set aside income to handle fire damage, while implementing every safety precaution he and his men could think of. The practice saved the company thousands and, eventually, millions of dollars; over time, its insurance funds grew to the point where they could be used to pay large dividends to shareholders. (In later years, Rockefeller contained the risk of fire even more by multiplying refineries across the country, so that one disaster could do only so much damage.)33

Another refining cost that Rockefeller minimized was the chemical treatment of kerosene. Samuel Andrews was skilled at determining the right quantity of sulfuric acid needed to completely purify distilled kerosene. This was important because sulfuric acid was expensive. Rockefeller saved money by getting ideal results with 2 percent whereas competitors often used up to 10 percent.34

And in building his refineries, Rockefeller used the highest quality materials to get maximum longevity from equipment—thus avoiding the reliability issues of early stills—and he built large facilities so as to lower his labor costs per gallon refined.

Revenue Maximization

Rockefeller also worked to maximize the amount of revenue he could bring in, both by selling by-products of crude besides kerosene and by establishing marketing operations in major consumer states and overseas. Appalled at the idea of wasting the 40 percent of his crude that was not kerosene, Rockefeller extracted and sold the fraction naphtha, and he sold much of the remaining portion of the crude to other refiners who specialized in other non-kerosene fractions, such as paraffin wax and gasoline. (He also used fuel oil from crude to help power his plants, thereby saving money on coal.) Later, Rockefeller’s firm refined and sold all these fractions—becoming what is called a “complete” refinery—but even before that development, he let no cost-cutting or value-creating opportunity go to waste.

In the mid-1860s, Rockefeller set up an office in New York City to focus on overseas sales. The overseas market for kerosene was larger than the American market and presented a great opportunity to Rockefeller since nearly all the world’s known oil at the time was American. Recognizing the importance of having a steady stream of foreign demand, Rockefeller had his brother head the New York operation to keep tabs on the various markets and maximize sales.

These improvements in efficiency and marketing resulted in a company that was staggeringly more productive than most of its rivals, and well on its way to revolutionizing the oil refining industry.

Saving to Invest

Rockefeller’s obsession with cutting costs has been called “penny-pinching”35—a term that aptly describes his desire and ability to cut costs to the smallest detail. But insofar as it conjures an image of a miserly businessman, the term does not apply. Rockefeller, by disposition and in action, was anything but averse to spending money; he recognized that spending in the form of investingwas vital to the dramatic increases in efficiency he sought and achieved.

Many of Rockefeller’s penny-pinching methods requiredinvestments, often large ones. He knew that although these would cut into his cash in the short run, they would prove profitable in the long run—if the company simultaneously invested in its growth. The greater the firm’s output, the more it could leverage economies of scale, achieving greater efficiency by dispersing productivity-increasing costs over a greater number of units. By virtue of its size and output, Rockefeller’s firm was able, for example, to purchase, maintain, and replant forests in order to more efficiently produce barrels—a strategy that would be utterly unprofitable for a small refiner producing, say, fifty barrels a day.

The bigger the company, the more it can invest in efficiency-increasing measures—from tank cars to forests to purchasing agents to self-insurance—when it makes financial sense. Recognizing this, Rockefeller reinvested profits in the business at every opportunity. Whereas other oilmen in the booming 1860s spent almost all of their profits on the premise that current market conditions would endure and therefore future revenue would easily cover their future costs, Rockefeller reinvested as much of the firm’s profit as possible in its growth, efficiency, and durability.

Rockefeller also solicited large amounts of capital from outside the company. Early on, he borrowed money frequently, which he could do easily given his lifelong track record of perfect credit. Rockefeller’s penchant for borrowing turned out to be his path to assuming full leadership of the company. His business partner, Maurice Clark, routinely complained during the refinery’s first two years about Rockefeller’s borrowing, and in 1865 threatened to dissolve the firm. Rockefeller called his bluff, announced the dissolution in the paper, and agreed to bid with him for the refinery business. The 26-year-old Rockefeller won, for a price of $72,500 (the equivalent today of about $820,000).36 Clark thought he had gotten a bargain—but given what Rockefeller was to accomplish in the next five years, Clark would undoubtedly come to think twice.

Rockefeller, Andrews, and Flagler

In 1867, Rockefeller accepted an outside investment of several hundred thousand dollars from Henry Flagler and John Harkness.37 The investment turned out better than anyone could have hoped; Rockefeller gained not only vital capital, but also Flagler, who would be his beloved right-hand man for decades to come.

By 1870, the firm of Rockefeller, Andrews, and Flagler was, thanks to Rockefeller’s vision, a super-efficient refining machine, generating more than fifteen hundred barrels a day38—more than most refineries could produce in a week—at lower cost than anyone else. And in that year, the firm became the Standard Oil Company of Ohio—a joint-stock company, of the type used by railroads, that enabled Rockefeller to more easily acquire other refiners in the coming years.

Reflecting Rockefeller’s profitable investments in efficiency, the Company declared assets including “ . . . sixty acres in Cleveland, two great refineries, a huge barrel making plant, lake facilities, a fleet of tank cars, sidings and warehouses in the Oil Regions, timberlands for staves, warehouses in the New York area, and [barges] in New York Harbor.”39

But Standard’s most important asset was Rockefeller, followed by his close associates. Rockefeller’s ambition for the expansion of the business was only growing, and he talked with Henry Flagler morning, noon, and night about possibilities and plans. Reflecting on the company nearly fifty years later, Rockefeller recalled: “We had vision. We saw the vast possibilities of the oil industry, stood at the center of it, and brought our knowledge and imagination and business experience to bear in a dozen, in twenty, in thirty directions.”40

The days of indistinguishably inefficient refiners were over. And Rockefeller, barely thirty, was just scratching the surface of his productive potential.

Having explored this much of Rockefeller’s hard-earned success, let us turn to his most controversial form of cost savings and efficiency: railroad rebates.

Virtuous Rebates

Historians overwhelmingly attribute Rockefeller’s success to his dealings with the railroads, dealings that are almost universally viewed as “anticompetitive.”

Here is Ida Tarbell’s description of how Rockefeller advanced ahead of other refiners—as described from their perspective (with which Tarbell agrees).

John Rockefeller might get his oil cheaper now and then . . . but he could not do it often. He might make close contracts for which they [other refiners] had neither the patience nor the stomach. He might have an unusual mechanical and practical genius in [Samuel Andrews]. But these things could not explain all. They believed they bought, on the whole, almost as cheaply as he, and they knew they made as good oil and with as great, or nearly as great, economy. He could sell at no better price than they. Where was his advantage? There was but one place where it could be, and that was in transportation. He must be getting better rates from the railroads than they were.41

Tarbell’s prose unforgivably evades Rockefeller’s vast productive superiority over his competitors in the late 1860s. It is possible that some of Rockefeller’s competitors believed this in the 1860s—as Rockefeller, to the extent possible, kept his business methods and the scope of his operations secret—but for Tarbell to write this in the 1900s is absurd.

Also absurd is the implication of the success-by-rebates story: that railroads arbitrarily gifted Rockefeller with rebates so enormous he was able to bankrupt the competition. No seller of the era (or any era) gave Rockefeller or anyone unnecessary or unprofitable discounts—certainly not railroads, which were often struggling financially. Rockefeller earnedhis rebates, by devising ways to make his oil cheaper to ship and by setting shippers in competition with one another so that he could negotiate them down to the best price.

The story of Standard’s first known rebate illustrates the true nature of the phenomenon. In this case, Standard extracted a big discount by dramatically lowering a railroad’s shipping costs.

When the Lake Shore railroad built a connection to Cleveland in 1867, Flagler went to the railroad’s vice president and offered to pay 35 cents a barrel for shipping crude from the Oil Regions to Cleveland, and $1.30 a barrel for kerosene sent to New York (usually for export). In exchange for these discounts, Flagler offered the Lake Shore a major incentive: guaranteed, large, regular shipments.

This was a huge boon to the Lake Shore, and its vice-president James H. Devereux readily accepted the deal. As he explained:

[T]he then average time for a round trip from Cleveland to New York for a freight car was thirty days; to carry sixty cars per day would require 1,800 cars at an average cost of $500 each, making an investment of $900,000 necessary to do this business, as the ordinary freight business had to be done; but [research showed] that if sixty carloads could be assured with absolute regularity each and every day, the time for a round trip from Cleveland to New York and return could be reduced to ten days, . . . only six hundred cars would be necessary to do this business with an investment therefore of only $300,000.42

Devereux added: “Mr. Flagler’s proposition offered to the railroad company a larger measure of profit than would or could ensue from any business to be carried under the old arrangements. . . .”43

Guaranteed, large shipments were a landmark, cost-cutting innovation in oil transportation—identical in nature to Rockefeller’s use of tank cars or his cost-cutting in barrel production. As economic and antitrust historian Dominick Armentano summarizes, Standard also “furnished loading facilities and discharging facilities at great cost; . . . it provided terminal facilities and exempted the railroads from liability for fire by carrying its own insurance.”44

In addition to lowering railroads’ costs to obtain better prices, Rockefeller’s firm was expert at setting railroads against one another and cultivating alternative means of shipping, such as waterways, to further lower shipping costs. Having established the location of his first refinery near the Erie Canal and having built up a large capital position he was able to take advantage of the lower rates of shipping by water; because it was slower than shipping by land it required a company to have, in addition to water access, the capital to handle the larger delay between paying for crude and being paid for kerosene.

Of much of his competition, Rockefeller said: “The others had not the capital and could not let the oil remain so long in transit by lake and canal; it took twice as long that way. . . .”45

Rockefeller’s rebates, then, were an earned cost savings of the sort that any market competitor—and any consumer—should perpetually seek. The extent to which others could not match the low prices he was able to charge in the 1870s as a result of his many cost-cutting measures, including this one, is simply an instance of productive inferiority; nothing about it is coercive or “anticompetitive.”

To say that Rockefeller—by cutting his costs, thus enabling himself to sell profitably for lower prices and win over more customers—was rendering competitors “unfree” is like saying that Google is rendering its competitors unfree by building the most appealing search engine. To call Rockefeller’s actions “anticompetitive” is to say that “competition” consists in no one ever outperforming anyone else. Economic freedom does not mean the satisfaction of anyone’s arbitrary desires to succeed in any market regardless of ability or performance or consumer preferences; it means that everyone is free to produce and trade by voluntary exchange to mutual consent. If one cannot compete in a certain field or industry, one is free to seek another job—but not to cripple those who are able to compete.

Free-Market Discovery

True economic competition—the kind of competition that made kerosene production far cheaper—is not a process in which businessmen are forced by the government to relinquish their advantages, to minimize their profits, to perform at the norm, never rising too far above the mean. Economic competition is a process in which businessmen are free to capitalize on their advantages, to maximize their profits, to perform at the peak of their abilities, to rise as high as their effort and skill take them.

Rockefeller’s meteoric rise and the business practices that made it possible—including his dealings with the railroads—epitomize the beauty of a free market. His story provides a clear demonstration of the kind of life-serving productivity that is the hallmark of laissez-faire competition.

Vindicating Capitalism: The Real History of the Standard Oil Company

2011-08-31T09:13:00.000-07:00

[Author’s Note: This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that found Standard Oil guilty of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. As punishment, the world’s largest and most successful oil company was broken into 34 pieces.

Ever since, Standard Oil has served as the textbook example of why we need antitrust law--in the business world in general and in the energy business in particular. The Court’s decision affirmed a popular account of Standard Oil’s success, first made famous by journalists Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida Tarbell. In the absence of antitrust laws, the story goes, Standard attained a 90% share of the oil-refining market through unfair and destructive practices such as preferential railroad rebates and “predatory pricing”; Standard then leveraged its unfair advantages to eliminate competition, control the market, and dictate prices.

Within the oil and electricity industries in particular, the spectre of a coercive monopoly developing in the absence of government intervention was used to justify coercive, monopolistic behavior by the government in the “common good,” be it by the Texas Railroad Commission or by government electrical utilities. This article challenges the mythology of the Standard Oil case and, more broadly, the notion that a coercive monopoly can arise in the absence of government intervention. By implication, it illustrates that there is nothing standing in the way of a truly free, competitive energy market--an energy market free of antitrust law.]

Who were we that we should succeed where so many others failed? Of course, there was something wrong, some dark, evil mystery, or we never should have succeeded!1

—John D. Rockefeller

In 1881, The Atlantic magazine published Henry Demarest Lloyd’s essay “The Story of a Great Monopoly”—the first in-depth account of one of the most infamous stories in the history of capitalism: the “monopolization” of the oil refining market by the Standard Oil Company and its leader, John D. Rockefeller. “Very few of the forty millions of people in the United States who burn kerosene,” Lloyd wrote,

know that its production, manufacture, and export, its price at home and abroad, have been controlled for years by a single corporation—the Standard Oil Company. . . .

The Standard produces only one fiftieth or sixtieth of our petroleum, but dictates the price of all, and refines nine tenths. This corporation has driven into bankruptcy, or out of business, or into union with itself, all the petroleum refineries of the country except five in New York, and a few of little consequence in Western Pennsylvania. . . . the means by which they achieved monopoly was by conspiracy with the railroads. . . .

[Rockefeller] effected secret arrangements with the Pennsylvania, the New York Central, the Erie, and the Atlantic and Great Western. . . . After the Standard had used the rebate to crush out the other refiners, who were its competitors in the purchase of petroleum at the wells, it became the only buyer, and dictated the price. It began by paying more than cost for crude oil, and selling refined oil for less than cost. It has ended by making us pay what it pleases for kerosene. . . .2

Many similar accounts followed Lloyd’s—the most definitive being Ida Tarbell’s 1904 History of the Standard Oil Company, ranked by a survey of leading journalists as one of the five greatest works of journalism in the 20th century.3Lloyd’s, Tarbell’s, and other works differ widely in their depth and details, but all tell the same essential story—one that remains with us to this day.

Prior to Rockefeller’s rise to dominance in the early 1870s, the story goes, the oil refining market was highly competitive, with numerous small, enterprising “independent refiners” competing harmoniously with each other so that their customers got kerosene at reasonable prices while they made a nice living. Ida Tarbell presents an inspiring depiction of the early refiners.

Life ran swift and ruddy and joyous in these men. They were still young, most of them under forty, and they looked forward with all the eagerness of the young who have just learned their powers, to years of struggle and development. . . . They would meet their own needs. They would bring the oil refining to the region where it belonged. They would make their towns the most beautiful in the world. There was nothing too good for them, nothing they did not hope and dare.4

“But suddenly,” Tarbell laments, “at the very heyday of this confidence, a big hand [Rockefeller’s] reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future. The suddenness and the blackness of the assault on their business stirred to the bottom their manhood and their sense of fair play. . . .”5

Driven by insatiable greed and pursuing his firm’s self-interest above all else, the story goes, Rockefeller conspired to obtain an unfair advantage over his competitors through secret, preferential rebate contracts (discounts) with the railroads that shipped oil. By dramatically and unfairly lowering his costs, he slashed prices to the point that he could make a profit while his competitors had to take losses to compete. Sometimes he went even further, engaging in “predatory pricing”: lowering prices so much that Standard took a small, temporary loss (which it could survive given its pile of cash) while his competitors took a bankrupting loss.

These “anticompetitive” practices of rebates and “predatory pricing,” the story continues, forced competitors to sell their operations to Rockefeller—their only alternative to going out of business. It was as if he was holding a gun to their heads—and the “crime” only grew as Rockefeller acquired more and more companies, enabling him, in turn, to extract ever steeper rebates from the railroads, which further enabled him to prey on new competitors with unmatchable prices. This continued until Rockefeller acquired an unchallengeable monopoly in the industry, one with the “power” to banish future competition at will and to dictate prices to suppliers (such as crude oil producers) and consumers, who had no alternative refiner to turn to.

The Shared Narrative

Pick a modern history or economics textbook at random and you are likely to see some variant of the Lloyd/Tarbell narrative being taken for granted.

Howard Zinn provides a particularly succinct illustration in his immensely popular textbook A People’s History of the United States. Here is his summary of Rockefeller’s success in the oil industry: “He bought his first oil refinery in 1862, and by 1870 set up Standard Oil Company of Ohio, made secret agreements with railroads to ship his oil with them if they gave him rebates—discounts—on their prices, and thus drove competitors out of business.”6

Exhibiting the same “everyone knows about the evil Standard Oil monopoly” attitude, popular economist Paul Krugman writes of Standard Oil and other large companies of the late 19th century:

The original “trusts”—monopolies created by merger, such as the Standard Oil trust, or its emulators in the sugar, whiskey, lead, and linseed oil industries, to name a few—were frankly designed to eliminate competition, so that prices could be increased to whatever the traffic would bear. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this was bad for consumers and the economy as a whole.7

The standard story of Standard Oil has a standard lesson drawn from it: Rockefeller should never have been permitted to take the destructive, “anticompetitive” actions (rebates, “predatory pricing,” endless combinations) that made it possible for him to acquire and maintain his stranglehold on the market. The near-laissez-faire system of the 19th century accorded him too much economic freedom—the freedom to contract, to combine with other firms, to price, and to associate as he judged in his interest.

Unchecked, economic freedom led to Standard’s large aggregation of economic power—the power flowing from advantageous contractual arrangements and vast economic resources that enabled it to destroy the economic freedom of its competitors and consumers. This power, we are told, was no different in essence than the political power of government to wield physical force in order to compel individuals against their will.

In the free market, through unrestrained voluntary contracts and combinations, Standard had allegedly become the equivalent of a king or dictator with the unchallenged power to forbid competition and legislate prices at whim. “Standard Oil,” writes Ron Chernow, author of the popular Rockefeller biography Titan, “had taught the American public an important but paradoxical lesson: Free markets, if left completely to their own devices can wind up terribly unfree.”8

This lesson was and is the logic behind antitrust law, in which government uses its political power to forcibly stop what it regards as “anticompetitive” uses of economic power. John Sherman, the author of America’s first federal antitrust law, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, likely had Rockefeller in mind when he said:

If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition, and to fix the price of any commodity.9

An Overdue Reconsideration

But Rockefeller was no autocrat. The standard lesson of Rockefeller’s rise is wrong—as is the traditional story of how it happened. Rockefeller did not achieve his success through the destructive, “anticompetitive” tactics attributed to him—nor could he have under economic freedom.

Rockefeller had no coercive power to banish competition or to dictate consumer prices. His sole power was his earned economicpower—which was no more and no less than his ability to refine crude oil to produce kerosene and other products better, cheaper, and in greater quantity than anyone thought possible.

It has been more than one hundred years since Ida Tarbell published her History of the Standard Oil Company. It is time for Americans to know the real history of that company and to learn its attendant and valuable lessons about capitalism.

Real vs. ‘Pure and Perfect’ Oil Refining Market

Any objective analysis of the nature of Rockefeller’s rise to dominance—Standard Oil had an approximately 90 percent market share in oil refining from 1879 to 189910—must take into account the context in which he rose. This means taking a thorough look at the market he came to dominate, before he entered it.

Traditional accounts of Rockefeller’s ascent, which began in 1863, portray the pre-Rockefeller market as a competitive paradise of myriad “independent refiners”—a paradise that Rockefeller destroyed when he drove his competitors out of business and wrested full “control” of the oil refining business for himself.

This idealized view of the early oil refining market appeals to most readers, who have been taught that a good, “competitive” market is one with as many viable competitors as possible, and that it is “anti-competitive” to have a market with a few dominant participants (“oligopoly”), let alone one dominant participant (“monopoly”). This view of markets was formalized in the 20th century as the doctrine of “pure and perfect” or “perfect” competition, which holds that the ideal market consists of as many distinct producers as possible, each selling equally desirable, interchangeable products.

Under “perfect competition,” no one competitor has any independent influence on price, and the profits of each are minimized as much as possible (on some variants of “perfect competition,” prices equal costs and profits are nonexistent). Although advocates of this view acknowledge (or lament) that it cannot exist in reality, they view it as a model market toward which we should at least strive.

By this standard, the early oil refining market was “perfect” in many ways. Many small, “independent,” practically indistinguishable refiners were in business. No one threatened to drive the others out of business, and the market was extremely easy to enter; those with no experience in refining could buy the necessary equipment for three hundred dollars and start making profits almost immediately.11 Some refiners recovered their start-up costs after one batch of kerosene.12

But the traditional perspective ignores the crucial aspect of markets relevant to their impact on human life: their productivity—how much it produces, the value of that which is produced, and the efficiency with which it is produced. By this standard, the oil refining market was anything but perfect—refiners were at an early, primitive stage of productivity, which happily ended.

This is not a moral criticism of the early oil refining industry. The first five years of that industry, along with the crude production industry, from 1859 to 1864, were full of great achievements. It is almost impossible to overstate the dramatic and near-immediate positive effect of a group of scientists and businessmen discovering that “rock oil,” previously thought to be useless, could be refined to produce kerosene—the greatest, cheapest source of light known to man.

In 1858, a year before the first oil well was drilled, only well-to-do families such as that of 11-year-old Henry Demarest Lloyd could afford sperm whale oil at three dollars per gallon to light their homes at night.13For most, the day lasted only as long as did the daylight. But by 1864, just five years into the industry, a New York chemist observed:

Kerosene has, in one sense, increased the length of life among the agricultural population. Those who, on account of the dearness or inefficiency of whale oil, were accustomed to go to bed soon after the sunset and spend almost half their time in sleep, now occupy a portion of the night in reading and other amusements; and this is more particularly true of the winter seasons.14

Still, the market’s primitive methods of production and distribution at this early stage made it impossible for it to have anywhere near the worldwide impact it would have by the time Lloyd’s famous essay damning Rockefeller was published.

A particularly problematic area was transportation, which was convoluted and extremely expensive. Oil was transported in 42-gallon wood barrels of spotty quality, costing $2.50 each. Each one had to be filled and sealed separately and piled onto a railroad platform (where barrels were prone to leak or fall off) or occasionally onto a barge (where barrels were prone to fall off and start fires).15The myriad small refiners each could ship only a handful of barrels at a time; this required the railroads to make many separate stops at different destinations for different refiners, which resulted in a lengthy and expensive journey for both railroads and refiners.

And for some time, this was the best aspect of the process. In the early days, to get barrels of crude oil from assorted oil spots in northwest Pennsylvania onto railways headed for the refineries, oil was transported by horse and wagon by teamsters, often through roadless territory and waist-high mud, with barrels perpetually bouncing and frequently breaking or falling out. (Because of government intervention, the teamsters had a huge influence in politics and for years prevented the construction of local pipelines—an incomparably superior form of oil transportation.)16

The refining process, the core of the industry, was also at a primitive stage. To refine crude oil is to extract from it one or more of its valuable “fractions,” such as kerosene for illumination, paraffin wax for candles, or gasoline for fuel. The heart of the refining process uses a “still”—a distillation apparatus—to heat crude oil at multiple, increasing temperatures to boil off and separate the different fractions, each of which has a different boiling point.

Distillation is simple in concept and basic execution, but to produce quality kerosene and other by-products requires precise temperature controls and various additional purification procedures. Impure kerosene could be highly explosive; death by kerosene was a common phenomenon in the 1860s and even the 1870s, claiming thousands of lives annually. In fact, the spotty quality of much American kerosene is what inspired John Rockefeller to call his company Standard Oil.17

Some refineries in the early 1860s, such as those of famed refiners Joshua Merrill and Charles Pratt, produced safe, high-quality kerosene, but most did not. Tarbell’s exalted “independent refiners” from the Oil Regions of Pennsylvania, incidentally, produced the worst quality kerosene.

“Deluded by petroleum enthusiasts as to the simplicity of refining,” write Williamson and Daum in their comprehensive history of the early petroleum industry, “individuals inexperienced in any form of distillation flocked into the new business. . . .” But, they note,

successful petroleum refining . . . called for the utmost vigilance. . . . Real separation of the various components of crude oil was no objective at all; their major purpose was simply to distill off the gases, gasoline and naphtha fractions as fast as heat and condensation could permit. All condensed liquid that conceivably could be fobbed off as burning oil . . . was recovered and the tar residue was thrown away. . . . Only in the provincial isolation of the Oil Region and nearby locations did such outfits receive serious designations as petroleum refineries.18

In a mature market, such operations, with their inferior, hazardous products, would never succeed. But in the early stages of the market, anyonecould succeed, because the overall refining capacity was insufficient to meet the enormous demand for kerosene.Even lower-quality kerosene was spectacularly valuable compared to any other illuminant Americans could buy.

The supply-and-demand equation of kerosene even made it possible for refiners with low efficiency to profit handsomely. In 1865, kerosene cost fifty-eight cents a gallon; at one-fifth the cost of whale oil this was a great deal for consumers—and it was a price at which anyone with a still could make money. Even if the still was very small, requiring much more manpower and other expenses per gallon of output than a larger still; even if the still refined only kerosene and failed to make use of the other 40 percent of crude; even if the still was low-quality and needed frequent repair or replacement—the owner could turn a healthy profit.19

This stage of the industry was necessarily temporary. As more and more people entered the refining industry, attracted by the premium profits, prices inevitably went down—as did profits for those who could not increase their efficiency accordingly.

Such a process, which began in the mid-1860s, was more dramatic than almost anyone expected. Between 1865 and 1870, refining capacity exploded relative to oil production, and prices plummeted correspondingly. In 1865, kerosene cost fifty-eight cents a gallon; by 1870, twenty-six cents.20 Refining capacity was increasing relative to the supply of oil; by 1871 the ratio of capacity to crude production was 2.5:1.21 At this point, those who expected to make a livelihood with three-hundred-dollar stills found the market very inhospitable.

A shakeout of the efficient men from the inefficient boys was inevitable. In the mid-1860s, no one imagined that the best of the men, by orders of magnitude, would turn out to be a 24-year-old boy named John Davison Rockefeller.

House GOP announces jobs plan focused on cutting regs, taxes - The Hill's On The Money

2011-08-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

House GOP announces jobs plan focused on cutting regs, taxes - The Hill's On The Money

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) on Monday laid out an ambitious anti-tax and anti-regulations agenda for the fall.

In a memo to rank-and-file Republicans, Cantor said the House will target 10 major regulations for elimination, and will also seek to enact one major tax cut for businesses.

Republicans are offering the agenda as a contrast to President Obama’s jobs plan, which is set for formal announcement next week and is expected to include stimulus spending.

“I think the administration has … already demonstrated that it is not interested in focusing on private sector growth,” Cantor said after announcing the plan on Fox News. “What our list demonstrates is: Washington now has gotten in the way, and we’ve got to make it easier, finally, for small business people to grow.”

Cantor’s proposals will face an uphill battle in becoming law, but could make their way into a package produced by the supercommittee of 12 lawmakers charged with recommending $1.5 trillion in deficit cuts by late November. Democrats want that package to focus on economic stimulus to create jobs.

The more far-reaching tax proposal outlined in Cantor’s memo would allow small business owners to deduct 20 percent of their income from their taxes.

This proposal is being offered as a contrast to the Obama administration effort to raise taxes on individuals making more than $200,000 per year, and families with annual income higher than $250,000. Many small businesses file taxes as individuals.

One key Democrat labeled Cantor’s agenda as a distraction meant to deflect attention from the fact that the GOP is blocking proposals to stimulate the economy, including through the extension of a payroll tax cut.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the agenda was “intended only to provide cover for blocking the kind of pro-growth proposals needed to make a difference.”

“House Republicans are struggling to play catch up on jobs after Fed Chairman [Ben] Bernanke called for more aggressive fiscal policies than they have supported so far,” Schumer said. “But when they even stall common-sense measures like continuing the payroll tax cut for the middle class, it’s clear Republicans are still putting politics ahead of our economic recovery.”

The 10 regulations targeted in the memo were identified by committee chairmen as the most harmful to the economy. The majority are issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, but labor and healthcare rules are also targeted.

A series of votes on repealing the regulations would begin in September and would be followed in late November or early December by a vote on separate legislation requiring that all major regulations get an up or down vote in Congress. The House will also vote on two bills changing the way regulatory impacts are analyzed, Cantor said in the memo.

The first regulation to be targeted is born out of Boeing’s conflict with the National Labor Relations Board.

Cantor said the House will consider legislation the week of Sept. 12 authored by Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) that would forbid the NLRB from seeking to stop companies from moving work to new locations. The NLRB is alleging Boeing moved work to South Carolina to punish unionized workers in Washington state.

Later in September and in October, the House will consider rules meant to stop pollution that affect utilities, cement makers, coal companies and firms using boilers. In the winter, ozone rules and dust regulations will be considered before the House votes on legislation to prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases to combat climate change.

Cantor’s jobs push also has a healthcare component aimed at ensuring that employers will still be able to offer employee coverage under Democrats’ healthcare reform law.

The three committees of jurisdiction — Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce and Education and Workforce — are charged with putting together legislation to repeal “restrictions” in the law that could make it prohibitively expensive for employers and health plans to continue offering coverage.

The legislation is scheduled to come up in the last two months of this year under Cantor’s proposal.

In the winter, the GOP plans to target a proposed NLRB regulation that Republicans say will give employers too little time to organize ahead of union elections.

Cantor is also prioritizing a second tax-law change that would end a rule, set to go into effect in 2013, that requires the federal government to withhold 3 percent of payments to contractors as a way to improve tax compliance.

The majority leader noted in his memo that the GOP expects Obama to submit pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea soon, and for the Senate to vote on a House-passed patent-reform bill that gives the United States a first-to-file system of patent approvals, rather than the current first-to-invent system.

Julian Pecquet and Pete Kasperowicz contributed to this story.

Taking the Alter Challenge on Obama’s Record

2011-08-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

Taking the Alter Challenge on Obama’s Record - By Jim Geraghty - The Campaign Spot - National Review Online

Last night I appeared on the radio program of Tom Bevan, co-founder of RealClearPolitics, with Jonathan Alter – formerly of Newsweek, now with Bloomberg News, who has challenged readers to prove to him that Barack Obama has been a bad president.

Alter said he has received more than 1,000 responses, ranging from thoughtful to, er, probably what you would expect from a question that suggests that disappointment or disapproval of the president is a national egregious misjudgment. Before you berate him, at least credit Alter for concluding that Paul Krugman’s political advice to the president is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. (My words, not his.)

Tom’s radio program doesn’t run long enough to lay out every Obama policy mistake from a conservative perspective. And none of that is likely to be persuasive to a liberal who looks at the conservative worldview and concludes, “well, that’s just wrong.”

So instead, let’s look at Obama’s presidency through the lens of an apolitical independent who doesn’t think much about policy details. To this hypothetical voter, the single biggest problem has Obama’s failure to deliver – they’ve heard the president’s near-perpetual pledges that prosperity is just around the corner, followed by consistent disappointment.

Any president can botch a policy, but Obama compounded his mistake by constantly believing that the stimulus was working when the data throughout 2009 and 2010 indicated anemic economic growth and a jobs market that was stagnant at best. Obama, Biden, and the rest of the economic team behaved and spoke as if a real recovery was just around the corner, even running around with the slogan “Recovery Summer” when the signs of stagnation have been consistent over the past three years.

So why has recovery from this economic recession/depression been different from most others?

Right now, non-banking companies are sitting on piles of cash – Moody’s puts it at one and a quarter Trillion, with a T-R. These cash reserves have increased one half trillion since 2008. Why are they not using that cash to hire people? Different companies will give you different answers, but they have deep anxieties and uncertainty about what’s coming next out of Washington. The National Federation of Independent Businesses finds small business owners’ optimism plummeting again, with regulation and taxes ranking number two and three in these businesses’ lists of biggest problems (number one was low sales). (Collectively, taxes and regulation are listed as the top problem of 36 percent of small businesses, compared to 23 percent saying ‘low sales.’)

If you want businesses to start hiring at a faster pace, Washington needs to say to employers A) we will not raise your taxes B) we will not make you pay a ton more for your employees’ health insurance C) we will not make you pay a ton more for energy costs through either cap and trade or new EPA regulations on energy production.

Alter asks, “Does any president who presides over 9 percent unemployment deserve to lose?” Well, yeah, particularly if that 9 percent unemployment persists for four years or so.

For the entirety of the Bush years, despite hearing from our friends on the Left about how bad they were, unemployment was between 4 percent and 6 percent. Let’s face it, if unemployment were 5 percent, Obama would be near-certain for reelection.

Alter mentioned the now-tired point about the fact that the economy is at least now adding jobs. But as I said last night, we’re not adding jobs at the rate need to keep pace with normal workforce growth – usually 100,000 to 200,000 jobs per month. Secondly, millions of Americans have left the workforce during Obama’s term. If you throw them into the total, the unemployment rate is closer to 11 percent and this economy looks even crappier.

Alter writes:

When Obama took office, the economy was losing about 750,000 jobs a month and heading for another Great Depression. The recession ended (at least for a while) and we now are adding several thousand jobs a month — anemic growth, but an awful lot better than the alternative. How did that happen? Luck?

Notice the extraordinarily low bar for a not-bad president: merely ceasing to lose 700,000 jobs per month. Why are we not losing 700,000 jobs per month? Because we hit bottom, and we are now “bouncing along the bottom,” a phrase recently used to describe the housing markets. From Alter’s perspective, this current stagnation is the best anyone could possibly hope to “enjoy.” He’s Jack Nicholson arguing that this is as good as it gets.

The stimulus was not sufficiently stimulative. Infrastructure spending can be useful – imagine widening the roads in the most heavily-trafficked areas, reducing commuting time for millions of Americans and shortening shipping time for billions in goods – but it’s not particularly fast-moving and it’s not, as the president later admitted that he learned, “shovel-ready.” If I had a magic wand, I would have eliminated the entire payroll tax for the entirety of 2009, effectively giving every American a 7 percent raise and making every employee 7 percent less costly to every employer; the self-employed would have received the equivalent of a 14 percent raise. (I realize a bunch of other smart conservatives disagree on this, but I would hope everybody could agree it beats replacing five-year-old sidewalks in Boynton, Oklahoma.)

There’s plenty more, of course. Obama pledging to put away childish things in his inaugural address and then cutting off debate with Republican lawmakers by declaring, “I won,”; Obama the senator who said that voting to raise the debt limit was a fil ; Obama the senator declaring that increasing the deficit by $4 trillion is “unpatriotic,” when Obama the president has now raised it by $4.02 trillion in a much shorter period of time…

Say "Yes" to Oil Sands

2011-08-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

Say "Yes" to Oil Sands

Top 10 Things Obama Could Have Done Differently:

2011-08-29T10:08:00.000-07:00

Top 10 Things Obama Could Have Done Differently: Excessively well-sourced Obama boosters are now channeling, not just White House spin but White House self-pity. Both Ezra Klein and Jonathan Alter wonder aloud why our intelligent, conscientious, well-meaning, data-driven President is taking a “pummeling.” ”What could Obama have done?” (Klein) “What, specifically, has he done wrong .. .?” (Alter)

They’re kidding, right? There are plenty of things Obama could have done differently. Most of these mistakes were called out at the time. Here, off the top of my head, are ten things Obama could have done:

1. Not subcontracted out the details of the 2009 stimulus to interest-group-addled Congressional Democrats. Instead, he could have drawn up his own plan that relied more on large, quick payroll tax cuts rather than the ”shovel ready” infrastructure projects that, as Obama later admitted, weren’t shovel ready and (in the case of home-weatherization efforts) were delayed most of the year while bureaucrats figured out how to apply union-backed “prevailing wage” regulations. And why do we think aid to state and local governments–a stimulus centerpiece–had such a big Keynesian “multiplier”? Didn’t many states use the money to pay down their debts rather than retain workers?

2. Sold his health care reform as a valuable benefit for voters that would give them security (they’d be covered) and freedom (they could leave their jobs without losing insurance) rather than as an eat-your-peas plan that would not only “bend the cost curve” by denying treatments but somehow actually reduce the deficit–a sales pitch that assured Obamacare would be unpopular and vulnerable long after Dems rammed it through Congress. At the time, New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza said that Obama had “staked his presidency” on Budget Director Peter Orszag’s notion that “health care reform is deficit reduction.” It was a stupid bet. He lost it.

3. Made the UAW take a pay cut. Whoever else is to blame, the UAW’s demands for pay and work rules clearly contributed to the need for a taxpayer-subsidized auto bailout. To make sure that future unions were deterred from driving their industries into bankruptcy, Obama demanded cuts in basic pay of … exactly zero. UAW workers gave up their Easter holiday but didn’t suffer any reduction in their $28/hour base wage. Wouldn’t a lot of taxpayers like $28 hour jobs? Even $24 an hour jobs?

4. Pivoted! In 2010, after the health care bill passed, Obama was going to “pivot” to jobs but wasn’t able to do that when … yeah, I don’t remember what prevented him from doing it either. What’s that FDR quote Alter likes to trot out, about “bold, persistent experimentation”? That is not the attitude the Obama White House gives off when it comes to jobs. Maybe the Weitzman profit-sharing plan isn’t the answer. Maybe a use-it-or-lose-it credit card won’t work. Maybe a neo-WPA paying minimum wages wouldn’t attract unemployed middle class workers–though it could be tried in one or two states. But Obama’s attitude has been: “I tried A. I proposed B. So I propose B again. And again. And again.”

5. Not pursued a zombie agenda of “card check” and “comprehensive immigration reform”–two misguided pieces of legislation that Obama must have known had no chance of passage but that he had to pretend to care about to keep key Democratic constituencies on board. What was the harm? The harm was that these issues a) sucked up space in the liberal media, b) made Obama look feckless at best, delusional at worst, when they went nowhere; c) made him look even weaker because it was clear he was willing to suffer consequence (b) in order to keep big Democratic constituencies (labor, Latinos) on board.

6. Dispelled legitimate fears of “corporatism“–that is, fears that he was creating a more Putin-style economy in which big businesses depend on the government for favors (and are granted semi-permanent status if they go along with the program). I don’t think Obama is a corporatist, but he hasn’t done a lot to puncture the accusations. What did electric carmaker Tesla have to promise to get its Dept. of Energy subsidies? Why raid GOP-donor Gibson’s guitars and not Martin guitars? We don’t know. At this point, you have to think the president kind of likes the ambiguity–the vague, implicit macho threat that if you want to play ball in this economy, you’re better off on Team Obama. That’s a good way to guarantee Team Obama will be gone in 2013.

7. Stolen some populist Tea Party thunder by going vigorously after Wall Street. Even Alter says Obama “neglected to use his leverage over the banks and failed to connect well with an angry public.” (Alter was also the first to get Obama’s admission of “shovel-ready” ignorance. How many does it take, Jon?)

8. Not appointed pro-union innovators to NLRB who try to hamstring our biggest remaining industrial exporter by preventing it from opening a non-union factory in South Carolina–and then not had his spokesman say there’s nothing the president can do about it because, hey, the NLRB is “independent.”

9. Faced with Republican demands for leaner government, embraced them! Instead of letting GOPs make him the champion of bigger government and higher taxes, Obama could have said he thought higher taxes are probably inevitable but that he wasn’t going to raise them or cut a penny from benefits until he was sure all the fat has been wrung out of Washington. Become Dr. Cut-the-Bloat! Instead of letting his top management official advertise for a new $80,000-a-year ”deputy speechwriter,” tell him to lead a government-wide diet of the sort private companies conduct all the time. Publicize and promote the agency heads who cut their staffs and lower their budget requests instead of those who protect their turf. Have some “RIFs”–actual layoffs of redundant bureaucrats. The goal would not just be to reduce the deficit but to shrink the government to a level that’s … how do they put it … sustainable. This would be the greatest gift Obama could give to liberalism, and it would leave the Republicans gasping for air, speechless, Don’t they teach “co-optation” in Alinsky School? Given the choice between a triangulator and someone who acts like a triangulator, people will vote for the real triangulator every time.

10. Defend the core of Medicare, a popular universal program that works and (according to Orszag) is cutting costs, rather than proposing to shrink Medicare by raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67. It seems like only yesterday Democrats were trying to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 55–a political winner. Now the party has to defend a standard bearer who wants to raise taxes but who has no sympathy for the most valuable things those taxes pay for. (Screw granny for “green jobs”!).

**********

Would doing these 10 things have revived the economy? Who knows. Probably not. FDR didn’t really revive the economy either until World War II began, as Alter knows. But Obama would have shown leadership and creativity. He wouldn’t be both unsuccessful and disdained.

P.S.: I’m also not saying that Obama is necessarily headed towards a failed presidency in the larger judgment-of-history sense. Just a single-term presidency. If his health care reform sticks, he’ll go down as a success in a way Jimmy Carter won’t. One day soon we may look back on 2011 with fond longing. But that’s not the question Klein and Alter asked.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/28/top-10-things-obama-should-have-done-differently/#ixzz1WRGoAW5j

Manchester’s Claims to Soccer Supremacy

2011-08-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

If you’re talking about international soccer in the truly international sense, the sport’s capital could probably be said to reside on a lush, extravagantly wealthy and previously unmapped island located somewhere between Barcelona and Rio de Janeiro, with a private landing strip reserved for Lionel Messi whenever he cares to visit. But with all due respect and apologies to Spain’s top-heavy and talent-rich La Liga a case could be made that England’s Premier League is, for lack of a less redundant phrasing, the sport’s premier league, at least in terms of global following, as well as the top-tier players employed there and their top-tier paychecks. So it could be argued that the city that rules the EPL rules global soccer. And while Sunday was just one day, it was a day that also seemed to signal, strongly, that the seat of power in Premier League soccer had moved a couple hundred miles to the north.

“Manchester became the capital of English football, with [Manchester] City crushing Tottenham 5-1 at White Hart Lane and then United winning 8-2 to condemn Arsenal to their biggest loss since 1927,” the Independent’s Tim Rich writes. “By the end, both Manchester clubs were leading the Premier League with a combined goal difference of +19 after three matches, while only a last-minute goal for Stoke at West Bromwich Albion prevented Arsenal from joining Tottenham in the relegation zone.”

It’s cold comfort to some shivering fans, but not all of this can be attributed to the ineptitude of Tottenham and Arsenal. The EPL’s twin Mancunian powerhouses have looked brilliant so far, and this year’s model at United is looking like a team that could both make history and hurt some feelings. Even in context, Manchester United’s victory was remarkable. “Arsenal might be a shadow of its former self. … But this was still an eye-opening, rollicking and monumental signal of intent for the campaign,” Yahoo’s Martin Rogers writes. “It does seem right now as if there are two outstanding teams in the EPL – and they are situated just down the road from each other.” ESPN’s Mark Payne was more succinct in regards to United’s showing. “This is officially the match where it became impossible to remain calm about what United can achieve this season,” he wrote.

Which is all very nice for Manchester United, of course. It doesn’t make things any easier for the team on the short side of that lopsided result, even if the spectacular loss in question – it was the first time in a century that Arsenal had allowed eight goals – came as a result of being outclassed by a spectacular team. In the end, Arsenal deserved its loss as much as United deserved its win. “In the hard-nosed world of American gridiron, they call what Manchester United did to Arsenal running up the score,” The Independent’s James Lawton writes. ” Unfortunately, yesterday, United were not given a whole lot of alternatives.”

After losing stars Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri in the transfer market and enduring a raft of suspensions and injuries to critical players, Arsenal was clearly a team in transition. But a loss like this was painful enough to cast into doubt whether legendary Gunners coach Wenger could survive. “Wenger is a strong character – no one who survives at the helm of a Premier League side for a decade and a half could be anything else,” the Guardian’s Richard Williams writes. “But in the wake of this defeat, you had to wonder whether he will be able to summon the resilience needed to overcome such a catastrophe. … When his side were invincible, Wenger was quite properly given the credit for his genius. Now failure must be laid at his door.”
* * *

For most sports fans, the names of the world’s fastest people are kicking around somewhere in the great, echoing space we reserve for recollection of stats and names and best-fill-in-the-blank-I-ever-saw moments. And then the Olympics come around, and we put faces to names like Asafa Powell and Lolo Jones. Usain Bolt, though, is different. He’s different because it’s difficult to think of a way in which his name could be more memorable, but also because the way in which the Jamaican sprinter has dominated and redefined the 100-meter distance is the sort of thing you just don’t forget. Bolt almost offhandedly smashed a world record in the 100 at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and continued at that pace for another year – until he abruptly seemed to lose his stride somewhat, due to injuries and things harder to identify.

“Who knows why Bolt hasn’t been like an Xbox monster for the last two years?” Sports Illustrated’s Tim Layden writes. “If Bolt loses, he’s a two-year wonder, Flo-Jo doubled until further notice. If he wins, it’s one more step toward a long, dominant career, uninterrupted by failure when it counts most.”

At the world championships on Sunday, Bolt managed to do neither. A false start disqualified him from the 100-meter finals as part of the sport’s new, tougher rules.

“For Bolt, becoming a legend means consistent domination, meant defending his titles from Beijing and Berlin,” Christopher Clarey wrote in the New York Times. “As his sport debates anew the merits of the draconian false-start rule that came into force in 2010, Bolt will now have to settle for trying to defend his 200 title.” Between that and righting the ship after this peculiar period of drift, it looks like a challenge even for the world’s most memorable sprinter.
* * *

Right up until it didn’t, Javaris Crittenton’s career trajectory looked for all the world like that of a player destined for great things. A star prep point guard at Southwest Atlanta Christian high school, Crittenton carried a stellar reputation and a fine GPA into Georgia Tech, where he excelled on and off the floor during his sole season with the Yellow Jackets. He slid somewhat in the 2007 NBA draft, but he was still the 19th overall pick after just one year in college.

While he bounced around some after that, Crittenton could have had a solid career before his involvement in the ultra-stupid gun-related prank that nearly ruined Gilbert Arenas’s career sent him into a tailspin. Last weekend, things appeared to hit bottom when news broke that Crittenton was wanted for murder in his hometown, where police allege he killed a 23-year-old woman – an innocent bystander, as if that matters at all – in a drive-by shooting. (Crittenton’s agent, Mark Bartelstein, declined comment on the allegations.)

To call Crittenton’s descent puzzling and saddening doesn’t seem quite sufficient to the bleak, strange facts of the case. “There’s not a clear plot from there to here, even if you fill it in with injuries and one very public mistake turning a NBA backup role into a for-hire D-League career,” SB Nation’s Jason Kirk writes. “All we’re left to piece together is the story of a young man who quietly worked his [butt] off until he reached the highest point of his profession, then lost his mind as his career fell apart.”

Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at dailyfixlinks@gmail.com and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email David at droth11@gmail.com.

Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit

www.djreprints.com

Loyal to the end: Heart-breaking photo shows Navy SEAL's devoted dog guarding his coffin

2011-08-25T08:49:00.000-07:00

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029688/Navy-SEAL-Jon-Tumilsons-dog-sits-coffin-funeral.html#ixzz1W3oXqfYd

This heart-wrenching photo shows how a Navy SEAL’s dog refused to leave his master’s side during an emotional funeral.

Petty Officer Jon Tumilson, 35, killed in the major U.S. helicopter crash in Afghanistan this month, was remembered by around 1,500 mourners.

But it was his Labrador retriever Hawkeye that really captured the public’s emotions in the photo taken by Mr Tumilson’s cousin, Lisa Pembleton.

Scroll down for video
Sadness: Navy SEAL Jon Tumilson's Labrador retriever Hawkeye was loyal to the end, as he refused to leave his master's side during an emotional funeral

Sadness: Navy SEAL Jon Tumilson's Labrador retriever Hawkeye was loyal to the end, as he refused to leave his master's side during an emotional funeral
Man's best friend: Mr Tumilson's family members followed Hawkeye into the service before he lay down

Man's best friend: Mr Tumilson's family members followed Hawkeye into the service before he lay down

Mr Tumilson, of San Diego, California, was one of 38 killed on August 6 when a rocket-propelled grenade took out a U.S. Chinook helicopter.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO HAWKEYE?

Nikki Virgilio, a friend of Mr Tumilson (known as J.T.) who was at the funeral, said Hawkeye was a personal pet rather than a military dog.

'I can happily report to you that Hawkeye was willed to one of J.T.'s good friends, the same one that took care of him whenever J.T. was deployed overseas,' she wrote on Facebook.

'So he is assuredly in a loving home. J.T. was an amazing being and his dog is no different.'

His funeral was held on Friday in his hometown of Rockford, Iowa, at the Rudd-Rockford-Marble Rock Community School.

Ms Pembleton said: ‘I felt compelled to take one photo to share with family members that couldn't make it or couldn't see what I could from the aisle.

'To say that he was an amazing man doesn't do him justice. The loss of Jon to his family, military family and friends is immeasurable.'

During the service, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Robert Bradshaw told Mr Tumilson's parents that they helped raise an ‘outstanding man - a hero’.
Big funeral: Petty Officer Jon Tumilson, 35, killed in the Afghanistan helicopter crash this month, was remembered by around 1,500 mourners

Big funeral: Petty Officer Jon Tumilson, 35, killed in the Afghanistan helicopter crash this month, was remembered by around 1,500 mourners
Pride: Mr Tumilson's mother and father were told they helped raise an 'outstanding man - a hero'

Pride: Mr Tumilson's mother and father were told they helped raise an 'outstanding man - a hero'

Family, friends and servicemen, along with Iowa Governor Terry Branstad and U.S. Senator Charles Grassley, packed the school's gymnasium.

More...

Could U.S. sailors finally be returned home from Libya 200 YEARS after they died in 'To The Shores Of Tripoli' war?

‘I felt compelled to take one photo to share with family members that couldn't make it or couldn't see what I could from the aisle'

Lisa Pembleton, cousin

Mr Tumilson, who joined the Navy in 1995, was known to friends as J.T.

‘J.T. was going to be a Navy SEAL come hell or high water,’ friend Scott Nichols said. ‘He wasn't afraid of dying.’

‘If J.T. had known he was going to be shot down when going to the aid of others, he would have went anyway,’ friend and soldier Boe Nankivel said.
Packed: His funeral was held in his hometown of Rockford, Iowa, at the Rudd-Rockford-Marble Rock Community School

Packed: His funeral was held in his hometown of Rockford, Iowa, at the Rudd-Rockford-Marble Rock Community School
Downed: Mr Tumilson, of San Diego, California, was one of 38 killed on August 6 when a rocket-propelled grenade took out their Chinook helicopter

Downed: Mr Tumilson, of San Diego, California, was one of 38 killed on August 6 when a rocket-propelled grenade took out their Chinook helicopter

Mr Tumilson's sister, Kristie Pohlman, said he always dreamed of joining the military's elite special forces unit.

‘If J.T. had known he was going to be shot down when going to the aid of others, he would have went anyway'

Boe Nankivel, friend and fellow soldier

‘Your dreams were big and seemed impossible to nearly everyone on the outside,’ she said. ‘I always knew you'd somehow do what you wanted.’

Family members followed Hawkeye into the service. Mr Tumilson is survived by two sisters and his parents, George and Kathleen.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029688/Navy-SEAL-Jon-Tumilsons-dog-sits-coffin-funeral.html#ixzz1W3ojDwZ4

Expensive massages, top shelf vodka and five-star hotels: First Lady accused of spending $10m in public money on her vacations

2011-08-25T07:37:00.000-07:00

The king and Queen of America have really had a time with our money - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029615/Michelle-Obama-accused-spending-10m-public-money-vacations.html

USC football: Petition to Dismiss USC Sanctions

2011-08-24T14:23:00.000-07:00

USC football: Petition to Dismiss USC Sanctions

With the criminal activity surrounding the U we should not have to suffer under sanctions assigned by one of those who oversaw the U partaking in the criminal behavior.

Perry Zooms to Front of Pack for 2012 GOP Nomination

2011-08-24T12:25:00.000-07:00

Perry Zooms to Front of Pack for 2012 GOP Nomination

What if Obama isn't so smart?

2011-08-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

What if Obama isn't so smart? | Noemie Emery | Columnists | Washington Examiner

By: Noemie Emery | Examiner Columnist | 08/23/11 8:05 PM
Eek! Another Republican moron is running for president, and the blogs on the Left are aghast.

Another village in Texas is missing its idiot!

Another s--t-kicking cowboy has messed with their heads.

The question this time is not just whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry is dumb -- the Left claims the obvious answer is yes -- but also whether he is as dumb as George W. Bush, or even much dumber, moronic where Bush was simply "incurious," and also much less gently bred.

Either way, few on the Left doubt that neither is, as Steve Benen says, "an intellectually curious, creative thinker, capable to examining [sic] complex issues in a sophisticated way."

Fortunately we have such a thinker, "capable to examining" things to perfection, and that is the problem: President Obama is their ideal of a thinker. He is president, and he has been -- how to put it? -- a bomb.

Based on results, Perry has been more successful as governor of Texas than Obama has been as president, or as anything else he has ever tried being, in the entire whole course of his life.

In 2008, Obama was hailed as a genius, a "first rate intellect," the smartest man to ever be president, and we know now the first part is true. He is the political genius who shed 30 points in his first years in office.

He's the political genius who blew up his coalition in his first months in office, who led his party to annihilation in the 2010 midterms (while showing utter indifference to the fate of congressional Democrats), and gave the Republicans -- who were on the floor, in a coma -- more than they needed to come roaring back from the dead.

He is the policy genius who "leads from behind," whose engagement ideas have gone nowhere, whose stimulus stimulated only the deficit, whose health care "success" helped kill off his recovery, and whose efforts to create jobs all fell flat.

Almost 40 percent of the new jobs that were created happened under Perry in Texas. Liberals who fault that state for its low levels of taxes and spending might ask themselves why, if it is a hellhole, so many people go there and stay there.

Many of them are fleeing states ruled by Democrats, which have high taxes, a strong union presence and a rich array of the programs that Democrats love.

If this is idiocy, we may want some more idiots, as Lincoln once asked for more drunks in his army, rather like Gen. Grant.

The bloggers fear that he may win a second term anyhow, as there may be a difference between being "too dumb to govern," (look at Bush, for example), and being "too dumb to win."

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones thinks Perry may be too dim for even the doltish American public, while Paul Waldman thinks otherwise. "The doltish candidates seem mostly on the Republican side," he writes in the American Prospect, while only Democrats have and/or treasure intelligence.

"So while there are many things to dislike about Perry, his tiny brain" might do him no harm. But the real examples of those who campaigned well and bombed afterward are Democrats, such as Obama and Carter, whose careers peaked on the day they took office and went steadily downhill from then on.

And if Obama is brilliant, and Bush is an imbecile, how come the genius kept most of the things the dolt set in motion: the protocols for fighting the war against terror, the surge strategy, the timetables, and even, in Robert Gates and David Petraeus, some of his main appointees? Why couldn't the genius improve on the idiot's handiwork?

Maybe he isn't that bright.

Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/08/what-if-obama-isnt-so-smart#ixzz1Vxudk3aE

Two Pictures of my father while in the Navy WW2

2011-08-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

The greatest generation is all but gone at this point, but these pictures remind us of their glory days. My father is on the right in both pictures second row from top in the group photo and on the right against the wall in the picture of six, which they were called "the filthy six".

Libya's deadliest weapons not yet corralled - Excellent

2011-08-24T09:10:00.001-07:00

Aug 24, 2:49 AM (ET)

By KIMBERLY DOZIER and DOUGLAS BIRCH

(AP) Libyan rebels fire into the air in the Bab El Bahrah district in Tripoli, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2011....
Full Image

WASHINGTON (AP) - No one can be sure who controls the Libyan government's weapons stockpiles, a stew of deadly chemicals, raw nuclear material and some 30,000 shoulder-fired rockets that officials fear could fall into terrorists' hands in the chaos of Moammar Gadhafi's downfall or afterward.

One immediate worry, U.S. intelligence and military officials say, is that Gadhafi might use the weapons to make a last stand. But officials also face the troubling prospect that the material, which was left under Gadhafi's control by a U.S.-backed disarmament pact, could be obtained by al-Qaida or other militants even after a rebel victory is secured.

The main stockpile of mustard gas and other chemicals, stored in corroding drums, is at a site southeast of Tripoli. Mustard gas can cause severe blistering and death. A cache of hundreds of tons of raw uranium yellowcake is stored at a small nuclear facility east of the capital.

Weapons demolition teams hired by the State Department have located and destroyed some of the anti-aircraft rocket systems in rebel-held parts of the country.

(AP) A Libyan rebel fighter reacts inside the main Moammar Gadhafi compound in Bab al-Aziziya in...
Full Image
U.S. and allied officials say chemical and nuclear stockpiles appear to be still under the control of what's left of the Libyan government despite rebel military advances into the capital. That may or may not be reassuring. It depends on whether Gadhafi loyalists, increasingly desperate, adhere to international agreements not to use or move the material.

The State Department has also sent experts to Libya to confer with rebel leaders and Libya's neighbors about abiding by those same compacts and beefing up border security to prevent weapons from being smuggled out.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Tuesday the U.S. is working to ensure that "the governing forces in Libya have full command and control of any WMD or any security assets that the state might have had." Jamie F. Mannina, spokesman for the State Department's Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, said Libya's known chemical weapons storage facilities have been monitored since the start of the civil war.

Still, many U.S. officials question whether NATO has enough people on the ground to make sure the material remains secure if Libyan security forces flee their posts. NATO's decision to limit its participation in the conflict has kept the coalition's investment in blood and treasure to a minimum. But that has not helped the cause of nonproliferation.

With the battle for the capital Tripoli still unfolding, military advisers from Britain, France, Italy and Qatar are feeding intelligence to the rebels and NATO bombers on the whereabouts of the enemy. That has left U.S. intelligence relying primarily on military drone, satellite and spy plane reports to track Gadhafi's arsenal.

(AP) Rebel fighter brakes the glass of the Moammar Gadhafi's tent inside the main compound in Bab...
Full Image
"No one seems clear" how many of the estimated 30,000 anti-aircraft rockets, and other stockpiles still remain after six months of pounding by air strikes, according to a U.S. official who has been following the Libyan events. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

As for chemical agents, said British Embassy spokesman Hetty Crist, officials are concerned about the security of some 11 metric tons of mustard gas.

Crist said the Libyan stocks are "under guard in secure and remote locations" at the moment and cannot be used easily for warfare because they are not weaponized.

Despite dismantling much of his nuclear program after making a deal with the Bush administration, Gadhafi has enough weaponry - if he can still reach it - to try to sell to militants.

"There are still going to be a lot of Gadhafi loyalists who could hijack the weapons supplies and use them for an insurgency like Iraq," said Democratic Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

(AP) A Libyan rebel mans a check point position at Bab El Bahrah district in Tripoli, Tuesday, Aug. 23,...
Full Image
And if the material goes unguarded, it could be seized by al-Qaida militant sympathizers, he said in an interview Tuesday. "A single rocket can do damage," he said, recalling the downing of a Chinook helicopter Aug. 5 in Afghanistan from a rocket-propelled grenade fired by the Taliban, killing all 38 troops on board.

The State Department has spent $3 million on two international weapons abatement teams charged with finding and destroying the antiaircraft systems along with other lethal munitions and landmines.

The teams have demolished some of the shoulder-launched antiaircraft missile systems called MANPADS, including nearly 30 Russian SA-7 launchers, according to Alexander Griffiths, director of operations for the Swiss Foundation for Mine Action, one of the abatement groups.

But the teams are only scouring rebel-held battle sites and arms depots, and are not sent into combat hot zones.

Libya possesses a variety of leftover, aging weapons of mass destruction. Libya agreed to halt its WMD programs in 2003, under economic pressure from U.S. and Western embargoes. Gadhafi surrendered the hardware for his nuclear program and let the U.S. remove about 11.5 pounds of weapons-grade uranium from a nuclear research reactor near Tripoli in 2009.

(AP) Libyan rebels break their Ramadan fast at a checkpoint in the Bab El Bahrah district in Tripoli,...
Full Image
But there are still some 500 to 900 metric tons of raw uranium yellowcake stored in drums at Libya's lone nuclear reactor, east of Tripoli. The supply is less of a worry for U.S. officials because it requires heavy industrial refining and enrichment before it could be used as an explosive. But it could be sold for a large profit to those more capable of building a nuclear weapon.

Gadhafi also had extensive chemical weapons, which his forces used against Libya's southern neighbor, Chad, in 1987.

After 2003, Tripoli closed its chemical weapons research and production facilities and destroyed 3,500 unfilled chemical shells used to deliver them on the battlefield.

But the scheduled destruction of some 23 tons of mustard gas didn't start until last year and was only halfway finished when the system used in the destruction broke, said Paul Walker of the environmental group Global Green, which closely monitors chemical weapons.

The remaining mustard agent is stored inside a domed concrete bunker a few hundred miles south of Tripoli, according to a U.S. official, who insisted on anonymity to speak about the WMD threat in Libya. The facility also had contained more than 1,300 tons of "precursor" chemicals that could be combined to make toxic agents, the official said.

The most pressing matter is to make sure the mustard gas does not end up on the black market or with terrorists, the official said. Stored in canisters that showed signs of corrosion during a 2006 visit by American officials, the chemicals could be easily moved.

Walker said he has heard no evidence that anyone has tried to divert the chemicals. "Any major action such as trucks pulling up, or major troop movements, that would be known pretty quickly," he said, "and action such as a NATO airstrike could be taken fairly quickly."

There is no indication that Libya has sarin, soman or other dispersible nerve agents that can cause death on contact. And Gadhafi's efforts to build a biological weapons program did not get far, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonproliferation group.