Speaker John Boehner Speech at the Economic Club of Washington

At New York Times, "Boehner, in Washington Speech, Reaffirms No-Tax-Increase Position."

Democrats Openly Alarmed About Obama's Reelection Prospects

Well, they should be.

At NYT, "Democrats Fret Aloud Over Obama’s Re-election." (Via Memeorandum.)

Democrats are expressing growing alarm about President Obama’s re-election prospects and, in interviews, are openly acknowledging anxiety about the White House’s ability to strengthen the president’s standing over the next 14 months.

Elected officials and party leaders at all levels said their worries have intensified as the economy has displayed new signs of weakness. They said the likelihood of a highly competitive 2012 race is increasing as the Republican field, once dismissed by many Democrats as too inexperienced and conservative to pose a serious threat, has started narrowing to two leading candidates, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, who have executive experience and messages built around job creation.

And in a campaign cycle in which Democrats had entertained hopes of reversing losses from last year’s midterm elections, some in the party fear that Mr. Obama’s troubles could reverberate down the ballot into Congressional, state and local races.

More at that top link, but clearly, the Dems are going to be crushed.

And like Bill Whittle said, it's not going to matter who the GOP nominee is. Obambi's toast.

How Many Jobs Have Obama's Policies Destroyed?

This ad ran ahead of Obama's jobs speech:

And see Power Line, "WANT MORE JOBS? THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT IS ENERGY":

Everyone knows that Obama’s jobs program is a joke; but let’s assume that you actually do want to help create a million or more jobs, while simultaneously increasing government revenues by many billions of dollars. How would you do it? It’s actually easy: just stop the irrational antagonism to energy development that is America’s most glaring public policy failure.

Lot of interesting charts at the post (via Memeorandum).

Cato Institute: 'Government Spending Doesn't Create Jobs'

Good timing:

Wall Street Journal Not Thrilled With Romney's Jobs Plan

See, "Mitt Romney's 59 Economic Flavors." After the praise, some criticism:

On taxes, Mr. Romney would immediately cut the top corporate income-tax rate to 25% from 35%. His advisers say there's already a bipartisan consensus that the U.S. rate hurts American companies, and they're right. Even Mr. Obama agrees.

But on other taxes, Mr. Romney shrinks from a fight. He says he favors tax reform with lower individual tax rates but only "in the long run." His advisers say that means in the first two years of his Presidency, but then why not sketch out more details?

The answer may lie in his proposal to eliminate the capital gains tax—but only for those who earn less than $200,000 a year. This eviscerates most of the tax cut's economic impact and also suggests that he's afraid of Mr. Obama's class warfare rhetoric. He even picked Mr. Obama's trademark income threshold for the capital gains cut-off.

If Mr. Romney thinks this will let him dodge a class warfare debate, he's fooling himself. Democrats will hit him anyway for opposing Mr. Obama's proposal to raise taxes on higher incomes, dividends and capital gains in 2013. Perhaps Mr. Romney feels that his wealth and background make him especially vulnerable to the class charge, but if he won't openly make the economic case for lower tax rates he'll never get Congress to go along.

On spending, Mr. Romney joins the GOP's "cut, cap and balance" parade, setting a cap on spending over time at 20% of GDP. What Mr. Romney doesn't do is provide even a general map for how to get there, beyond cutting spending on nonsecurity domestic programs by 5% upon taking office.

That does sound a bit timid.

RTWT.

Larry Powell, Fresno County Superintendent of Schools, Retires for One Day in Salary Give Back to District

Not the kind of story you see very often.

At Los Angeles Times, "Fresno school official has a gift for giving":

Reporting from Fresno — It was supposed to be a quiet thing; no fanfare, no press releases.

Fresno County School Supt. Larry Powell and his wife, Dot, a retired principal, had figured out a way to help imperiled programs in their struggling school district.

He would retire for one day. Then come back to work at a pittance compared with his former salary — putting more than $800,000 of his salary and benefits back in the district's coffers.

But in tough economic times, when public trust has been repeatedly battered, word of an elected official giving back money quickly made its way from a Board of Education meeting to national headlines. Powell spent his "retirement" giving television and magazine interviews.

"We were trying to not create a big stir," said Armen Bacon, spokeswoman for the Fresno County Office of Education. "But we're living in a time of despair and people are so hungry for stories about the impact one person can make."

Powell officially retired Wednesday. The district was contracted to pay him $235,000 plus benefits a year through 2014. He went back to work Friday, rehired at a salary of $31,020 with no benefits, to run 35 school districts with 195,000 students.

Powell said he will give his new salary to charity. His former, heftier salary will go into the district's discretionary fund.

The Boston Globe has more:

Powell, a Baptist minister and lifelong educator who began his career as a high school civics teacher, was appalled by the revelations in Bell, the poor Southern California city where corrupt public officials secretly padded their paychecks by hundreds of thousands of dollars. “My wife and I asked ourselves, ‘What can we do that might restore confidence in government?’’’ he told the Associated Press. Their answer was to voluntarily forgo $800,000 in salary and benefits over the next 3½years. Powell chose to “retire’’ and then be hired back for just $31,000 a year - substantially less than what first-year teachers in California are paid. For that modest sum, he will continue to oversee 325 schools with 195,000 students.

He's not even keeping the $31 thousand.

But go back and check that Los Angeles Times piece. Powell can do this because his wife's a former principal and he'll be on her health care, and he's already earned at $200 thousand annual retirement from the state retirement system. Basically, the guy was raking the cash off taxpayer largesse and thought, "You know, I've had it good. Perhaps I might give some of this back so that others won't need for things." And that's the honorable thing right there.

President Zero

At NYT, "G.O.P.’s New Obama Label: President Zero":

It took the Republican National Committee exactly 94 minutes to coin a new, demeaning title for Barack Obama: President Zero.



In an e-mail to reporters, the committee took note of the worst jobs report in nearly a year, saying that there has been “two and a half years of Obamanomics and nothing to show for it.”



The monthly report, which showed a 17,000-job gain among private employers but no growth over all, provides Mr. Obama’s Republican rivals with the perfect opportunity to criticize him as they prepare to gather for another nationally televised debate next week.



And it gives Mr. Obama an even more gloomy backdrop for the jobs speech he will give to a joint session of Congress next Thursday. In the speech, Mr. Obama is expected to call for a renewed national effort to put people back to work and trim the nation’s deficit.

VIDEO: Bill Whittle's Talk in Newport Beach

Okay, one one more entry to hold readers until tonight.



At the Correspondence Committee:

These videos are absolutely worth the time.

I ask Bill a question at about 15:30 minutes at the third video, Q & A:

PREVIOUSLY: "Bill Whittle in Newport Beach!"

Weekly Republican Address, 8/20/11: Ohio Governor John Kasich

I really like Gov. Kasich. He's a follow-back guy on Twitter, which I thought was cool. And his presentation here just sounds like so much common sense. It's almost ridiculous how much optimism bursts forth from what he has to say. A can-do spirit is what this country needs amid endless progressive gloom-and doom and recrimination. Here's wishing Ohio luck and hopefully we'll see Kasich on the presidential campaign trail sometime in the future:

Maxine Waters: Y'all 'Unleash Us' on Obama

This is the black mofos' "let my Congress-people go" moment, from James Taranto, "'Unleash Us'" (via Memeorandum).

More Mark Steyn!

At Blazing Cat Fur, "John Oakely interviews Mark Steyn."

Obama to Announce Jobs Plan in Major Speech After Labor Day

It's a sign of deep desperation on the left when a combination of really last ditch political efforts come together simultaneously to set off screaming alarms bells. Top officials from President Obama's campaign vehicle, Organizing for America, are attacking the progressive blogosphere as a bunch of "firebaggers." In turn, there's all kinds of confusion on the "professional left" about this, and Jane Hamsher's backing off from taking one for the team. Then there's this story at today's front-page New York Times, "On Economy, Raw Data Gets a Grain of Salt." Read that all the way through. Hey, when things aren't going your way, attack the bureaucracy and the "flawed" government data, which of course JUST CAN'T make the boss look bad!! That said, "you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time." For example, at Gallup, "New Low of 26% Approve of Obama on the Economy." And so, for the formerly competent economic manager (cf. 2008 campaign during the Wall Street crash), what to do but fire up the teleprompter! TOTUS to the rescue. At New York Times, "Obama Plans Jobs Speech After Labor Day."

Runaway Spending

Cool graph.



At Heritage Foundation, "Runaway Spending, Not Inadequate Tax Revenue, Is Responsible for Future Deficits."

Democrats Pushing Obama to Do More to Create Jobs

At LAT, "Democrats urge Obama to be more aggressive on jobs."



They claim to have "new ideas." But Democrats simply want more spending. The innovation comes from the subterranean language devised to slough off these new big-government boondoggles on the people.

Bill Whittle in Newport Beach!

I have College Day at LBCC in the morning, so a big write up will have to wait. Note for now that the Newport Beach event was intimate and informative. Bill Whittle is a captivating speaker, very scholarly and counterintuitive on a number of points. And host Mike Munzing was welcoming and the guests energized and engaged. Great food too. More later!

Conservative Happy Hour with Bill Whittle

Okay, I'm heading out to the Bill Whittle event, in Newport Beach.



I'm sure he'll have a bang up presentation, given all that's been in the news just this last week. And for questions and answers, I'll be interested to see if he has an emendation to his optimistic take on American exceptionalism, seen here, in part, at his outstanding video presentation: "Bill Whittle's Firewall: 'What We Believe, Part 7: American Exceptionalism."

And tune back in here later tonight for a report and more regular blogging!

The U.S. Still Has a Promising Future?

Well, I certainly hope so.



But check Michael O'Hanlon, at Los Angeles Times, "Despite Problems, the U.S. Still Has a Promising Future":

Amid all the talk of gloom and doom in the United States, with the stock market's near-crash and the renewed threat of a double-dip recession, it is worth pausing to remember that the United States remains the greatest country on Earth. It is also the country with the most promising future. I make these assertions not as a matter of national pride, but as an analytical conclusion.

And he makes an excellent argument. The problem --- and I know it's a problem, because I'm just like O'Hanlon on this --- is that his analysis is almost completely structural. That is, O'Hanlon's looking at all this recent turmoil from a comparative power analysis interpretation, which almost systematically excludes internal political determinants. We can extrapolate from past patterns of America's remarkable exceptionalism and global preponderance and expect things to flow along fairly well simply because for all our troubles, no single other nation matches America's bounty or prospects. But the debt downgrade, as Danial Henniger points out today, is the ultimate signal that American hegemony is shrugging. To use Mark Steyn's analogy, we're like a prize fighter who's been hammered, and the opponent's sitting at the opposite stool, counting the seconds until the bell rings to come over for another round of pummeling. That's to say, for example, when Britain fell from preeminent status after WWI, and most definitely at the conclusion of WWII, the mantle of global political and eocnomic leadership passed to a benign power across the Atlantic, the United States. The U.S. had not only resisted the hegemonic role during the 1920s, but after WWII we did just about everything in our power to restore the defeated European nations and Japan to economic vitality and competitiveness. As America declines now --- and I'm using decline now for the first time really in agreement --- there's is no commensurate situation of the leading power passing the baton to a friendly rising power, as we experienced in 1945. China and Russia cooperate where possible but will seek advantage from America's weakening position, as power politics dictates, and that's while at the same time China is paradoxically hemmed in further from America's debt problems (mutual vulnerability forms a trace element of U.S. power internationally). And of course toss into the mix President Obama's hellbent agenda of making the United States the unexceptional nation, and well, let's just hope he's out in one term, November 6th, 2012. And the key factor for the electorate is the massive Democrat debt overhang. We're heading into a double-dip recession, some say. The Fed, for example, promised zero percent interest rates until 2013 because it expects no growth. The only thing good about this is that it almost guarantees that the Democrat ticket will lose next November. Even then, Republicans have been nearly as addicted to spending as the Democrats, with G.W. Bush's Medicare prescription drug expansion being Exhibit A. And the debt overhang will accelerate the collapse of U.S. world leadership unless two things happen: (1) we cut spending, and (2) the economy grows at a sustained pace of growth, say at three percent annual GDP for a decade or two, and then some. I can't see things turning around unless we have a combination of those two things, and without that we'll see a steady erosion of both U.S. global influence and a decline in the U.S. standard of living at home.



So, yes, Michael O'Hanlon makes a good case for continued optimism, but a more thorough analysis must consider the current failures of the American political system, and most importantly, the epic failures of the Democrat Party's expansionist, economic-killing social welfare policies.



More on this later ...

Main Street Bank, Kingwood, Texas, to Go Out of Business

What's interesting about this is that the bank chairman, Thomas Depping, cites strangulating regulation as driving him from the market. See Wall Street Journal, "Fed Up: A Texas Bank Is Calling It Quits":

Main Street Bank lends most of its money to small businesses and is earning decent profits. But the Kingwood, Texas, bank is about to get out of the banking business.



In an extreme example of the frustration felt by many bankers as regulators toughen their oversight of the nation's financial institutions, Main Street's chairman, Thomas Depping, is expected to announce Wednesday that the 27-year-old bank will surrender its banking charter and sell its four branches to a nearby bank.

Mr. Depping plans to set up a new lender that will operate beyond the reach of banking regulators—and the deposit-insurance safety net. Backed by the private investment firm of Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, the company won't be able to call itself a bank, but it will be able to do business the way Mr. Depping wants.



"The regulatory environment makes it very difficult to do what we do," says Mr. Depping, who last summer saw his bank hit with an enforcement order from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Continue reading.



If you're reading Mark Steyn's After America, this story is yet another eerie example, found in the book, of the kind of stifling anti-American regulatory burdens shutting down innovation and growth in this country. Perhaps Depping will do better in his new venture, but the move to shutter the bank is an real indictment of job-killing government oversight.

London Riots Make Front Page at Los Angeles Times

Yesterday's cover at the Los Angeles Times was a register of global social breakdown. At the left-hand side, "London Looks Inward, Lashes Out":

Facing a storm of criticism for remaining on vacation while his city burned, London Mayor Boris Johnson returned Tuesday to tour Clapham, a well-off south London neighborhood that was one of many stunned by three nights of hopscotching riots that left one man dead and littered the urban landscape with hundreds of damaged businesses and residences.



The shaggy-haired conservative was greeted by crowds of furious store owners asking where police were as their livelihoods were destroyed.



"I felt ashamed," he said after viewing the damage, "that people could feel such disdain for their neighborhoods."



Community leaders, sociologists, police and lawmakers were left groping for a meaning for the worst social unrest to hit London in a generation. The riots laid bare a phenomenon that has stirred deep unease in Britain in recent years: "yobbery," the anti-social behavior of a generation believed to be so alienated from the norms of civilized society that pockets of some cities live in fear.

Also at the paper, upper right, "Divided Fed Has Surprise for Markets." And then below that, "Angst on Main Street Threatens Recovery."



And at bottom is a story about long-shot GOP presidential candidate Fred Karger, "No Illusions, Just a Message for Gays":

Karger finally came out to his parents in 1991, after nursing a friend who died of AIDS. They accepted him, Karger says, but never seemed entirely comfortable. So he kept closeted, which was also better for business. Although he told his business partners — "it wasn't a surprise, and didn't change who or what he was," says one, Lee Stitzenberger — maintaining his secret kept Karger's sexuality from becoming a campaign issue.



When his parents died and he retired, Karger finally came out publicly. It was 2006 and he was 56 years old.



There was no grand announcement. He simply took a lead role in the unsuccessful campaign to save a Laguna Beach gay bar, the Boom Boom Room. Three years later, he founded Californians Against Hate to oppose Proposition 8, the measure banning same-sex marriage, and used his expertise to expose secret funding of the measure by the Mormon Church.



To some extent, his presidential campaign is an extension of that effort. By nudging Mitt Romney, the GOP front-runner and a prominent Mormon — preferably on stage, in front of a national TV audience — Karger would like to stop the church crusade against same-sex marriage. In his view, Romney could make that happen with a phone call.



Romney's feelings are unknown. His campaign declined to comment.

Karger might be a nice guy personally, but he's aligning himself with the progressive hate industry. And the Times is wrong on Mitt Romney. Romney recently "came out" and signed onto the pledge from the National Organization for Marriage to oppose gay marriage.



And last but not least, the one piece of front-page news that reflects the flip side of social decay, "Outlines of Downtown Stadium Deal Approved." There's a cool little graphic as well. We were just down there for X-Games and I was really impressed with the upbeat climate around Staples Center. That graphic looks like the stadium would be kinda crammed in there tight, although I'd have to spend more time downtown and get familiar with the area. The main thing though is that it would likely bring NFL football back to L.A., and needed jobs and civic vitality to go with it. That's the reverse of the social breakdown that seems to be breaking out everywhere these days.

'Our Debt Pool': People's Choice #5 at Power Line

This one was Hugh Hewitt's favorite: