Moveon's war on Democratic moderates

While we pause from the wall-to-wall coverage of the "war within the Republican Party," we can pause to notice that there is a little internecine conflict over on the left. Byron York reports that Moveon.org has raised money to target Democratic moderates. They should acknowledge what the Republicans are starting to learn. Certain districts aren't ideologically one way or the other. The only way a candidate will win there is to play to the middle. Just as the Republicans should accept a Mike Castle in Delaware or a Mark Kirk in Illinois as the best they can do to win in those states, the liberals have to accept their moderates or they can kiss their majorities good-bye.

The other goal of the Moveon'ers is to strip Democratic moderates of their Senate chairmanships.

And now, working in conjunction with Howard Dean's old organization Democracy for America, MoveOn is starting a drive to take away the committee chairmanships of any Democrat who fails to live up to MoveOn's progressive standards. "Many of these senators hold coveted committee chairmanships that give them significant power within the Senate," Ruben writes. "Our friends at Democracy for America have launched an open letter urging Senate Democrats to strip committee chairmanships from any Democrat who filibusters health care." Ruben says that more than 66,000 MoveOn and Democracy for America members have pledged to contribute.

"Chairing a committee is a privilege, not a right," Ruben continues. "So if a member of the Democratic Congress joins with Republicans in the most important vote in a generation, then they certainly don't deserve a position of power controlled by Democrats."

I predict that the leftists will have just as much luck at doing that as conservative Republicans had in trying to remove a Republican like Mark Hatfield from his Senate chairmanship after the 1994 takeover. There was a push to remove him from his chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee after he voted against the balanced budget amendment, thus sinking it. Rick Santorum led that movement. But then the caucus went behind closed doors and Mark Hatfield emerged with his chairmanship intact. I predict the same thing will happen behind closed doors of the Democratic caucus. When it comes down to it, respect for seniority will trump any desire to enforce ideological purity. Senators will start to wonder what will happen to their positions if they strike down the old rules. Robert Byrd will totter up and make a passionate speech evoking the sacred rules of the Senate and caucus and the move will die.

But, by all means, let's have Moveon.org get out there and run ads attacking their own members and running primary challenges. We'll see if the media regards that with as much simulated dismay as they regarded the move to push out Dede Scozzafava.

The realignment myth

Liberals have long been crowing about a political realignment from Republican to Democrat that was heralded by Obama's victory in 2008. As Charles Krauthammer argues today, that was a myth and the pendulum is swinging back.

In the aftermath of last year's Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics -- most prominently, rising minorities and the young -- would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed "The Death of Conservatism," while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

This was all ridiculous from the beginning. The '08 election was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.

The results from yesterday put a lie to the myth of the Democratic realignment. And should give President Obama and the Democrats pause as they seek to remake the country like pushing through a huge new reform that will create vast new bureaucracies and affect every single person's health care on a rushed strictly partyline vote.

What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they'd gone narrowly for Obama in '08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.

White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the '09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it's Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.

The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African American president.

November '08 was one shot, one time, never to be replicated. Nor was November '09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm -- and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.

The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm -- deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years -- because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his "New Foundation" for America -- from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.

Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama's hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt -- the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters -- as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.

I doubt if Fox News and talk radio has the power to muscle through the sort of reaction we saw at the voting booth yesterday. Democrats might want to hug the victory in NY-23 to themselves like a security teddy bear and mutter that this is a sign that Republicans are involved in a civil war that will break the party. Keep on thinking that, but ask yourselves, what are the chances that the anomalous situation in NY-23 will be repeated elsewhere - that party leaders will meet together and pick a Democrat-in-all-but name to run without any primary and that a conservative will be forced to run on third-party line? That isn't going to happen again.

The idea of a political realignment is greatly exaggerated. We perhaps saw one in 1896 with McKinley's election and in 1932 with FDR's. But mostly what we see is the pendulum swing. A party wins, gets in power, and then goes too far beyond where the country would like to be and then there is a corresponding swing back. One of the surest predictions after last year's election was that the Democrats would go too far and lose the support of many in the American public. If the Republicans were to take over the country, they would also.

I return to what Jay Cost wrote soon after Obama's reelection on whether or not it portended a realignment.

For the Republicans, much depends on how well Obama governs. If he governs to the public's satisfaction - the GOP could be in the minority for a while. If he does not - its return may be speedier.

Well, we have our answer now.

Simply dreadful

My heart goes out to the families and friends of the victims of the Fort Hood shooting yesterday. I keep thinking of the families so happy to have their soldiers home and then for this to happen.

What strikes me is how much of the original reporting was wrong on this story. Just follow the automatic updates that Allahpundit put up yesterday and see how much of the original story facts were just wrong.

As people plunge through this man's biography, they will try to come up with generalizations about the stresses of combat or his Muslim religion. It's dangerous to make a generalization based on the one incident. Especially when we're just at the preliminary stage of learning about this guy. Better to say that this was one seriously disturbed and twisted, evil man and not try to use his crime to score political points. But the media had a whole evening to fill without much information so a whole lot of fallacious speculating and reporting went on last night.

Guantanamo is so bad that some prisoners don't want to leave

How bad can Guantanamo be for the prisoners if some would rather stay there than be transferred to "supermax" facilities in the United States?

Since 2005 an Arab American cultural adviser, who for security reasons is identified only by the name of Zak, has been employed at Guantánamo to liaise with detainees.

He said that some detainees would rather stay put than go on trial in the US, where they would probably receive a life sentence or could wait years for a death sentence to be carried out.

"They know there will not be the same privileges as here," he said. "Given the choice of being sentenced forever in Guantánamo or moved to supermax, it is 'no, can I stay in Gitmo?'. Here they can be outside, they can smell the sea."

And why not? Sensitive to criticism, the U.S. officials have done as much as possible to cater to the religious concerns of the prisoners as well as providing them with lots of amenities not usually associated with a place being compared to a concentration camp.

The 221 remaining inmates receive between four and 20 hours outdoor recreation in the Caribbean sun and anything from weekly to almost unlimited access to DVDs and receive three newspapers (USA Today, plus one Egyptian and one Saudi Arabian title) twice a week. Every bed has an arrow pointing towards Mecca and every cell a prayer rug.

Adm Copeman said "generally speaking the rules are about the same" for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the September 11 attacks, and the 15 other "high value detainees", who are held at Camp 7, which is out of bounds to the media.

The detainees' diet is exclusively Middle Eastern and halal, in observance of regional and religious sensitivities. Dates, olive oil and honey are provided daily and pita bread is baked on the premises. They drink the same bottled water as the prison's staff and have the same access as other prisoners to 16,000 books and 1,600 magazines held at the library.

An escorted tour of Guantánamo by the Daily Telegraph revealed that Camp 7's requested reading included Gardens of the World by Mick Hales, Fine Art Flower Photography by Tony Sweet and a copy of Birds and Blooms magazine, material in keeping with nature-bound leisure pursuits approved by conservative Islam. Two volumes of the Tales of the Arabian Nights were also in the pile. Tomes on Islamic theory are in plentiful supply and demand, said library staff.

At the low security Camp 4, detainees could be seen sitting in the yard chatting and hanging up their laundry. A new gravel football field was recently completed.

Contrast that to the "supermax" prison they'd be sent to in the United States.

At Florence, Colorado, prisoners would also spend 22 ½ hours a day in a 9ft by 9ft cell with the only natural light coming from a skylight outside.

Exercise would be limited to an hour and a half indoors five days a week and they would have minimal contact with others, including the 33 other international terrorists held there. An official study found that most inmates suffer psychological trauma from the severe isolation.

Maybe all those human rights activists so concerned for the detainees should be lobbying for them to stay at Gitmo.

Nyah. The symbolism is more important to those upset by Gitmo than the reality.

How's that engagement policy working out for us?

President Obama proudly pronounced that he would be able to turn around our relations with Iran by "engaging" them in meaningful dialogues. Well, the Supreme Leader Khamenei doesn't seem to impressed, issuing a statement yesterday concerning the possibility of negotiating with the United States.

Iran's supreme leader, spurning what he described as several personal overtures from President Obama, warned Tuesday that negotiating with the United States would be "naive and perverted" and that Iranian politicians should not be "deceived" into starting such talks.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 70, said Obama has approached him several times through oral and written messages. It was the second time that Khamenei, who wields ultimate political and religious authority in Iran, has referred to the president's outreach.

"Naive and perverted." Sounds like a rejection of Obama's prized diplomatic overtures to me.

In his harshest comments yet on the Obama administration, Khamenei said in a speech Tuesday that the United States has ill intentions toward Iran and is not to be trusted.

"The new U.S. president has said nice things," he said. "He has given us many spoken and written messages and said: 'Let's turn the page and create a new situation. Let's cooperate with each other in resolving world problems.' "

Khamenei said he had responded in March to Obama's overtures, referring to a speech in which he said he would wait for changes in U.S. policy toward Iran before reassessing ties.

Since then, Khamenei said, "what we have witnessed is completely the opposite of what they have been saying and claiming. On the face of things, they say, 'Let's negotiate.' But alongside this, they threaten us and say that if these negotiations do not achieve a desirable result, they will do this and that."

Yesterday, the Iranian government encouraged mass demonstrations in honor of the 30-year anniversary of Iranian students taking over the American embassy in Tehran. Why celebrate the moment if Iran is at all interested in Obama's "engagement?"

In a message on the eve of the anniversary, "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei called on "true Muslims" to show "unquenchable anger against the Great Satan." The newspaper Kayhan promised "the largest crowds in Iran's history."

In fact, it is the Iranian people who are showing more fortitude than the American president as anti-Khamenei crowds gathered in counter-protest.

And just in case, there was any doubt about Iran's real goals, we had the story of the huge arms shipment headed to Syria and ultimately bound for Lebanon uncovered by the Israelis.

Hundreds of tons of weaponry, ten times the size of the Karine A shipment of 2002, were seized in an overnight raid Tuesday by the Israeli navy, some 100 nautical miles west of Israel, officials said.

Defense officials said the 140-meter long Francop, intercepted near Cyprus, was carrying arms sent by Iran and destined for Syria and possibly also Hizbullah.

The weapons seized on the ship, which was sailing under an Antiguan flag, included some 3,000 rockets of various types, as well as bullets and ammunition.

Meanwhile, they are just stringing Americans along about maybe yes, maybe no sending their enriched uranium to Russia. And the clock keeps ticking bringing this terrorist-supporting regime to the possession of nuclear weapons.

It's time for Obama to "reboot" his engagement strategy.

The transfer of such large amounts of weapons out of Iran could "create a balance of power" between Israel and terrorist organizations, assessed Brigadier General Rani Ben-Yehuda, deputy commander of the Israeli navy, at a press conference following the seizures.

Good enough for government statisticians

Everyone said that it was impossible to count how many "saved jobs" the stimulus bill had preserved. But the administration insists on that meaningless formulation because they know that, if they just talk about "created" jobs, people will start looking at how many jobs were lost and come up with a negative number. So they throw in this empty phrase that lets them include many more jobs.

Last week, the administration released a startlingly precise number - 640,329 - of how many jobs had been "created or saved" by the stimulus. They vowed that they had scrubbed and re-scrubbed the list so that it was a clean counting of what the stimulus had done. And voilà! Democrats who had voted for the stimulus now had a talking point. And now we are finding some of the silliness behind how that number was determined.

The Associated Press found that the administration counted raises that were given to people already employed as part of the beneficiaries of the stimulus whose jobs were "created or saved."

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren't saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren't saved.

That type of accounting was found in an earlier AP review of stimulus jobs, which the Obama administration said was misleading because most of the government's job-counting errors were being fixed in the new data.

The administration now acknowledges overcounting in the new numbers for the HHS program. Elizabeth Oxhorn, a spokeswoman for the White House recovery office, said the Obama administration was reviewing the Head Start data "to determine how and if it will be counted."

But officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.

"If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job," HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

The latest stimulus report, released Friday, significantly overstates the number of jobs spared with money from programs serving families and children, mostly the Head Start preschool program. The report shows hundreds of the programs used nearly $323 million to provide pay raises and other benefits to their existing employees.

The raises themselves were appropriate — the stimulus law set aside money for Head Start salary increases — but converting that number into jobs proved difficult. The Obama administration told Head Start officials to consider a fraction of each employee as a job saved.

Oh, dear. Mr. Rosero may want to talk to someone who works in the real world. Giving a raise rather indicates that there wasn't any plan to fire the employee in the first place. As Ed Morrissey wrote, "This could only come from people who never worked in the private sector."

But the administration statisticians figure it's all fine. Sure they're overcounting some jobs, but they're probably undercounting others. It will all come out in the press release.

Ed DeSeve, who oversees the stimulus at the White House, said the Head Start numbers "represent a few percent of all jobs reported" and said the problems would probably be balanced out by other errors that underreported jobs.

"So we don't expect any corrections to this data to meaningfully impact the total 640,000 direct jobs," DeSeve said.

Ah, that's a man with confidence in his numbers. He seemed a bit more sanguine about the accuracy of his numbers, although he still acknowledged that he expected errors to be found - though maybe he wasn't thinking that thousands of mistakes would be found within a week.

“I have dishpan hands, I’ve been scrubbing the data so hard,” joked Ed DeSeve, a Senior Advisor to the President for Recovery Act Implementation. DeSeve said his staff found one error of over thousands of jobs in the data before it was released publicly, and asked the recipient to resubmit accurate information.

“The data isn’t perfect,” DeSeve said. “Further updates and corrections will be needed.”

Undoubtedly.

This data have provided journalists with target-rich opportunities to find errors in the administration's count. The Chicago Tribune finds a bit of local overcounting.

More than $4.7 million in federal stimulus aid so far has been funneled to schools in North Chicago, and state and federal officials say that money has saved the jobs of 473 teachers.

Problem is, the district employs only 290 teachers.

"That other number, I don't know where that came from," said Lauri Hakanen, superintendent of North Chicago Community Unit Schools District 187.

I think we could all think of rather crude formulations of where those numbers came from, but I'll take the ladylike route. They're just making this stuff up.

But those statistics, compiled initially by the Illinois State Board of Education, appear riddled with anomalies that raise questions about their validity, according to a Tribune analysis of district-by-district stimulus spending and other state data. Many local school officials were perplexed by the stimulus data attributed to their districts.

In the official report, Wilmette Public Schools District 39 was credited with 166 jobs saved by stimulus aid. Superintendent Raymond Lechner said the number should be zero.

At Dolton-Riverdale School District 148, stimulus funds were said to have saved the equivalent of 382 full-time teaching jobs -- 142 more than the district actually has.

A similar discrepancy was found in data for Kankakee School District 111, where the stimulus report logged the equivalent of 665 full-time jobs saved. "That's impossible," a top Kankakee school official said, adding that the entire payroll -- full and part time -- is 600 workers.

But if that suggests the numbers for Illinois may be artificially inflated, then consider the following, which could suggest an undercount:

The totals do not reflect any school jobs saved or created in Chicago, the state's biggest district and the recipient of at least $293 million in stimulus funds. Chicago schools budget chief Christina Herzog said the district easily saved at least 1,200 jobs because of the stimulus, but didn't report them as such because of directives from the state board. State officials dispute that.

As And the reporters are just getting started. The WSJ reports today on some more mistakes.

Most recipients of stimulus money are required to file quarterly reports on how they used it. The government published more than 150,000 such reports late last week. A preliminary review revealed dozens of recipients claiming to have created or saved at least one job with less than $2,000 in stimulus money, to a total of at least 3,300 jobs.

A Kentucky shoe-store owner claimed to have created or saved nine jobs with an $889.60 contract to supply work boots to the Army Corps of Engineers. The owner said he supplied nine pairs of boots and that the mistake arose from confusion over the government form.

In addition, as many as 86% of the jobs estimated by recipients of Head Start grants could have been inaccurately reported, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The department said 277 of the 1,601 reports it had received were being reviewed after being contacted by the Journal. Those reports claimed 7,753 jobs created or saved out of a total of 8,997 reported.

Gee. If we could create a job with only $2,000 in stimulus money, shouldn't there have been a whole lot more jobs created for the billions that have been spent?

Imagine how many more of these sorts of errors there are in the administration's tally waiting to be found.

David Freddoso points out, this whole exercise misses the point. Yes, the federal government spent billions to try to address unemployment, but that overlooks the tradeoffs of what that money could have been spent for.

But the biggest problem with Obama's numbers is conceptual. Let's say that government spends $100 million on orange traffic cones, causing their manufacturers to hire 500 new people. If that $100 million hadn't been borrowed from investors and banks that buy up treasuries, could it not have gone toward a new start-up business that develops drugs or the next i-Phone? Could it not have put several credit-worthy borrowers into new homes?

Obama's job numbers, even if they are scrubbed of their many obvious inaccuracies, can never account for these hidden costs of government deficit spending.

For more, read about Frédéric Bastiat's "broken windows fallacy."Just think what could have been done if that $787 billion had been spent otherwise, perhaps on suspending the payroll tax so that it became cheaper to employ people across the board and so that people would have more money in their paychecks?

UPDATE: The errors keep on coming. Here is an analysis from Wisconsin.

A stimulus job report that says more than 10,000 jobs were saved or created in Wisconsin is rife with errors, double counting and inflated numbers based more on satisfying federal formulas than creating real jobs, a Journal Sentinel review has found.

In one case, five jobs were mistakenly listed as 50 - and then counted twice. In another, pay raises to workers were listed as saving more than 100 jobs. And in another, jobs were listed as saved even though the money had not been received and no work on the project had begun.

...About $7.3 million of federal money will flow to the Parkland Sanitary District in Douglas County to replace its sewer system, a project listed as creating or saving 100 jobs even though work won't start until this spring, federal recovery data shows.

But that number is inflated by 95 jobs, Parkland Sanitary District treasurer Eric Shaffer admitted.

When reporting to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's online reporting system, Schaffer meant to type "5" but mistakenly added a zero - and that 50-job figure appears twice in the federal data because it was a combined grant and loan. He tried to correct the error, but was told it was too late for the federal reporting deadline.

"We are volunteers, and we made a mistake," Shaffer said. "It was a simple typographical error, and we tried to fix it. Now that we understand the system, it will be much easier."

Meanwhile, three other Wisconsin towns reported jobs on combined federal loans and grants that were counted twice, doubling their totals from 35 to 70 jobs, records show.

Keep on waiting for journalists in each state to make a few phone calls and check out the numbers for their state. We can expect stories like this to keep trickling out.

Bicycle-riding mayor saves damsel in distress

Now this is the kind of story every politician would like told about him.

London Mayor Boris Johnson rescued a woman attacked by a group of girls wielding a metal bar after answering her plea for help during an evening bicycle ride, a spokeswoman for his office said on Wednesday.

And she hadn't even voted for him!

The Onion nails it

This is extremely funny.

Congress Approves $500 Billion For Monument To Human Folly

WASHINGTON—In recognition of mankind's inherent propensity for tragically foolish decisions, Congress allocated nearly $500 billion Monday for the construction of a new national monument honoring human folly.

"From Hannibal's disastrous crossing of the Alps to Custer's humiliating defeat at Little Bighorn, human history has been plagued by senseless mistakes, and it is high time we built a memorial to honor that history," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said of the expensive and ill-advised monument. "My deepest hope is that future generations of Americans will one day look upon this pointless edifice and be filled with a sense of awe and wonder at mankind's utter lack of foresight."

"To think of all the ways our time and money could have been better spent," Pelosi continued. "I can imagine no more fitting tribute."

According to the bipartisan plan, the proposed monument will be built precariously over a Washington freeway overpass, and will require as many as 30 years of grueling labor to complete. As a representation of humanity's failure to learn from past mistakes, the project is being designed by the architecture firm of Ganz & Weiss, best known for their work on a series of dangerously constructed St. Louis public housing projects that were condemned in the late 1990s.

"Our goal is to create a structure that, like the human race itself, is doomed from the outset and plagued by innate flaws that can never be corrected," Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) said of the monument, which he claimed would eventually sink into the federally protected wetlands that surround it. "Not only will it be an aesthetic disaster, but it will also require constant, expensive maintenance just to ensure that the whole foundation doesn't topple suddenly and kill hundreds of innocent people."

Read the rest. Warning: this is satire. Just in case it seemed all too real.

Obams the Unready

Glenn Reynolds writes today in the New York Post and puts forth an interesting point. I've long thought that Barack Obama didn't really think that he had a chance of either getting the Democratic nomination, much less winning the presidency, when he decided to jump into the Democratic nomination race. It seemed that he was thinking of getting his name out there, getting some experience, and setting up for a run in a future election after he'd gained more experience in the Senate.

In fact, the elections underscored Obama’s political weakness just one year after his triumphant victory over Republican moderate John McCain.

The Obama invincibility that was so much in evidence then seems to have lost its power. People can argue the reasons why these elections, all in places Obama carried handily, were so close. But if he were the political marvel he was thought to be, these races wouldn’t have been contests, but walkovers. So one consequence of this Election Day is the end of his special political magic.

That’s no surprise — as that magic was a largely substanceless froth whipped up by campaign consultants and compliant big-media cheerleaders.

The truth is, Obama wasn’t ready to be president when he ran in 2008. When he started, he probably thought he had no real chance — he himself admitted upon entering the Senate that he wasn’t qualified to be president — and that his first run would simply be a PR effort that would lift him to the top ranks of Senate Democrats.

When, to everyone’s surprise, resentment of the Clinton machine crystallized around him, he wound up beating Hillary for the nomination, and found himself riding an out-of-control express train. He rode it to victory, with some help from erratic McCain actions.

But he was right the first time about not being ready for the Oval Office. As president, he seems confused and a bit distant on the issues, leaving the details to congressional Democrats and an ever-growing number of "czars" while he golfs and launches attacks at Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

With the economy tanking (unemployment is much worse after Obama’s deficit-swelling stimulus than Obama’s advisers predicted it would be with no stimulus at all), with the promised post-partisanship dissolving into witch-hunts against hostile media and the promised post-racial America devolving into the awkwardly staged "beer summit," with the "necessary war" in Afghanistan the subject of endless dithering and the promised "smart diplomacy" materializing as a series of awkward missteps by Hillary Clinton, the froth has become a lot less frothy.

Republicans, who were prepared to give Obama the benefit of the doubt a year ago, now can’t stand him. Independents who voted for him are deserting in droves. And Democrats don’t seem that happy either.

As Reynolds points out, Obama has three years before he has to face the voters again. But many Democrats have to run next year. And, as yesterday's results demonstrate, bringing in Obama, Biden, and Bill Clinton to campaign for you won't help if the economy is still in the tank. The Democratic policies of pork-filled stimulus, tax and spend policies, and huge proposals that will affect every aspect of the economy aren't going to be a winning platform next year. And they can depend on the Republicans putting up "It's the Economy, Stupid!" signs around all their election headquarters.

Perhaps that is the reason that Senator Reid is having trouble getting a Democratic bill ready to put out on the Senate floor despite his brave words a few weeks ago and is now making noises about waiting until next year. Do the Democrats really think that it's going to be any easier to pass a massive bill in an election year, especially if unemployment continues this high? Remember when the "fierce urgency of now" demanded that we have a bill voted on before the August recess and then before the November elections? There were real reasons why that urgency was so fierce. The more people find out about the proposals, the more people have serious doubts about them.

Obama got what he wished for. The question more and more people are starting to wonder about is whether having a charismatic guy in the White House is enough to paper over the very real problems we're facing.

Toto, I don't think we're in 2008 anymore

Of course pundits are going to commit overanalysis of yesterday's results, because that's what they do. Elections, even if there are only a few of them are the only real data we have so we can make some conclusions based on the beatdown that the Democrats took yesterday.

There's no way to hide that the shellacking that Democrats suffered in Virginia and the beyond-the-margin-of-cheating Republican victory in New Jersey are not good augurs for the Democratic policies.

We can't quite conclude that the vote yesterday was a rejection of President Obama. But it sure wasn't an endorsement, as the Democrats would have argued if the numbers had been reversed. What it is more accurately, is a rejection of the policies that the Democrats, under Barack Obama's leadership, have been following.

People are concerned about pocketbook issues: jobs and government spending and more jobs. And the Democrats in D.C., Virginia, and New Jersey aren't offering the voters any confidence that Democratic policies are going to be successful in assuaging those worries.

Another lesson is that there are distinct limitations to the ability of Obama to transfer his personal popularity to other candidates. Both Creigh Deeds and Jon Corzine campaigned as part of the Obama movement for Hope and Change. Sure Creigh Deeds tried to separate himself from Obama earlier in the campaign, but in the past few weeks, he'd been grabbing onto those Obama coattails as tightly as he could. Just so you don't buy the White House spin that Virginia had nothing to do with President Obama, Jim Geraghty posts these pictures of Deeds and Corzine flyers.

Such a conclusion must be sending shivers down the spines of candidates who are up next year. What message will work with voters if the ol' "Hope, Opportunity, and Change" falls flat?

Another lesson - Bush-bashing and fear-mongering about social conservativism have reached their expiration date, if the Republican candidates can keep the focus on jobs and the economy. Jon Corzine spent millions and millions of his own money to bash Christie and tie him to Bush. Creigh Deeds spent almost his entire campaign bashing Bob McDonnell for the thesis McDonnell wrote 20 years ago. Byron York looks at the exit poll results to demonstrate that those negative attacks didn't resonate with the voters enough to overcome voters' distaste. McDonnell has provided a lesson that Republicans should go to school on. Keep your focus on the issues that the voters are worried about and social conservative issues are not the issues that are driving people today.

And the lesson from New York's 23rd district? For gosh sakes, have a primary and don't select a candidate in a non-smoke-filled room. Let the candidates compete and then have the party coalesce behind the winner. Yes, the conservative lost, but that seat will be up again next year. We'll see if a primary makes a difference in voting trends next year. Meanwhile, read Jay Cost's analysis of why we shouldn't be overinterpreting NY-23. Stephen Spruiell throws some cold water on any triumphalism Democrats might be feeling about Owens' victory in NY-23.

If Hoffman decides to run in 2010, he will probably be running against a Bill Owens whose party has forced him to take tough votes on monstrous health-care, energy and card-check bills. This is still a Republican district. Plus, Hoffman won't have to worry about zombie Scozzafava taking 5 percent of the vote.

And maybe he can actually more into the district.

And another message: Democrats need to worry about losing the votes of independents. Those are the voters who gave them the overwhelming majorities in 2008. But 2008 is history. The question now for independents is "what are you guys doing for us now?" And the answer wasn't good for the Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey.

For months, polls have shown that independents were increasingly disaffected with some of Obama's domestic policies. They have expressed reservations about the president's health-care efforts and have shown concerns about the growth in government spending and the federal deficit under his leadership.

Tuesday's elections provided the first tangible evidence that Republicans can win their support with the right kind of candidates and the right messages. That is an ominous development for Democrats if it continues unabated into next year. But Republicans could squander that opportunity if they demand candidates who are too conservative to appeal to the middle.

Mickey Kaus has a perceptive list of winners and losers from yesterday's races. He notes that, once again, Rasmussen did quite nicely.

Winner: Robopolls. Rasmussen's final poll, showing a 46-43-8 Christie win, was pretty damn accurate. Polls using conventional human operators tended to show Corzine ahead. They were wrong.** ... If you have a choice between Rasmussen and, say, the presitigous N.Y.Times, go with Rasmussen! ... Why this is important: Rasmussen's polls tend to show the highest level of opposition to health care reform. If they accurately predict who will turn out to vote, they may signify big potential trouble for Democrats in lower-turnout mid-term elections. The Democratic Congressional id--at least the part that represents primordial existential fear of non-reelection--is throbbing. Expect a lot more time-consuming negotiating hangups and talk about how we should avoid arbitrary deadlines when it comes to passing Obama's big reform. ... (I still think it will eventually pass, but it may take until next Spring or beyond.) ...

And now we'll look forward. We'll see how yesterday's message reverberates with Blue Dog Democrats hesitating over endorsing Pelosi's ginormous health bill. They surely won't feel more confident that such votes that Pelosi is demanding of her caucus are going to be popular enough to carry them over the finish line next year. And meanwhile, Republicans who were wavering about whether to jump in to the 2010 races have more reasons to take the gamble and run for office. Unless the economy and jobs picture markedly improve, they're going to have a hard time riding the Pelosi-Reid-Obama message into election next year.

What a tax on medical devices means to everyone

Mona Charen writes about how the health care reform proposals hit home in her family pushing her opposition to the plans from an intellectual debate into an issue that strikes her own family. She writes about her son's Type I diabetes and how having an insulin pump has not only changed his life, but will also extend his life. But the proposals now to slap a tax on such medical devices will chill the promise of future research and the development of new medical procedures and medicines.

Unless the medical-device industry is hit with a major tax.

While the U.S. leads the world in medical technology, most device makers are not huge conglomerates, but smaller companies already hurting in this recession. According to the Advanced Medical Technology Association, the industry consists of about 6,000 companies, most of which earn less than $100 million annually. The chief executive of B. Braun Medical, which makes pain-control devices, told the Washington Post that paying his share of the new tax would “exceed my research and development budget.” The $4 billion annual tax would represent about 40 percent of the industry’s outlay for research and development ($9.6 billion).

If this tax is enacted, medical-device manufacturers will cut back drastically on R&D, and may have to lay off employees. In addition, they will charge higher prices for their products to compensate for the money confiscated by Washington. Since health-insurance plans frequently cover half or more of the cost of these already-expensive products, health-insurance rates would have to rise as well. This is just one more example of the ways health-care costs would be driven up, not down, by the Democrats’ reforms.

Supporters of the Democrats' plan will point to those people with Type I diabetes who can't get coverage now. Yes. Let's address that problem with a more targeted solution than enact a massive overhaul that will have disastrous unintended consequences.

Al Gore: Making a bundle form global warming

The New York Times looks today at all the millions that Al Gore has made and stands to make from advocating his policies against global warming.

Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy as Mr. Gore and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.

Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

Gore argues that he's just putting his money where his mouth is. And he's not the only one.

Other public figures, like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who have vocally supported government financing of energy-saving technologies, have investments in alternative energy ventures. Some scientists and policy advocates also promote energy policies that personally enrich them.

That's fine. Americans believe in enterprise. However, imagine if a prominent Republican politician were advocating policies that would be good for the oil industry while standing to make millions off his own investments in that industry. Every single story would highlight that conflict of interest. It's time that every story about Al Gore's lobbying for green technology should also mention the money he is making and stands to make for the policies he's advocating.

You stay classy, Jim Moran

Democratic Representative Jim Moran of Virginia opined on Republicans this weekend.

Always good copy, U.S. Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) likened the Republican ticket in Virginia this year to Afghanistan's radical Taliban movement in comments broadcast Sunday by WAMU radio.

At a get-out-the-vote rally in Fairfax County, Moran said: "I mean, if the Republicans were running in Afghanistan, they'd be running on the Taliban ticket as far as I can see."

Moran was talking about Republicans Robert F. McDonnell for governor, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and state Sen. Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, who is running for attorney general. By some accounts, the three represent the most conservative Republican ticket to run in Virginia in many years. Moran's comments clearly were aimed to motivate Democratic voters to turn out on Tuesday and vote blue.

Jim Moran is a loon. As Allahpundit points out, the guy has a long history of saying totally wacky things and then trying to beat up those with whom he disagrees. My favorite is when he put an 8-year old boy into a chokehold because he thought that the boy was going to try to carjack his car in a parking lot.

I don't like Republicans like Virginia Foxx of North Carolina who say that her constituents fear the Democrats' health care plans more than terrorism. Our elected officials should know better than to make terrorist allusions for purely political debates.

I guess that Moran was envious of Democrat Alan Grayson having all the fun saying totally loony things. The two could hold a Loon-off between the two of them to see which would say the more extremist things. The New York Times likes to portray the Republicans as the only ones who say things to appeal to the wingnuts in their party, but, believe me, it's a bipartisan habit.

Using health care to help Big Labor

You don't think that the Democrats would let an opportunity like taking over one-sixth of the U.S. economy slip by without filling the bill with measures to help Big Labor, do you? Of course not.

The National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC) has identified a number of schemes buried within House and Senate versions of the proposed government-run health care program that would open the way to forced unionization.
These obscure provisions have been largely overlooked in the midst of an intense national debate over the merits of a public option. But the "employer mandates" and "cooperative health care associations" that would be used to implement a government-run system includes language that allows for union bureaucrats to take charge of health care decisions for millions of Americans.

Moreover, the expensive mandates that would flow from a new public option will not apply to union-negotiated health packages, providing them with a decisive advantage, the NRTWC points out in a new study. This political favoritism has been performed on the sly because Democrats are reluctant to advance overt paybacks to their union benefactors, even with expanded majorities.

Here's an example.

Consider the language contained in section 2531 submerged deep within the House version. Here the bill stipulates that any participating health care employer "provides wages and benefits to its nurses that are competitive for its market or that have been collectively bargained with a labor organization."

"This phrase 'competitive for its market' is not defined," said Greg Mourad, the main author of the NRTWC study. "This means the Obama administration will be free to define the phrase using Davis-Bacon standards and this would make it almost impossible for non-union employees to qualify."

The approach is similar to what has been done with apprentice programs in federal construction work, Stefan Gleason, vice-president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, explained.

"This is a scheme that is used to fund union organizations that are supposedly doing job training but are often doing other activities," he said. "The scenario that is set up essentially black-balls non-union contractors from even being eligible to work on federal contracts at all. There is a similar strategy at work here with health care."

Section 2531 also provides for state training partnership programs that include "even more explicit unionization requirements," according to the NRTWC study.

And some more.

Under section 164 of the House bill, union bosses who have mismanaged benefits for their own members are poised to receive a $10 billion bailout from U.S. taxpayers in the form of a "reinsurance program" that has been folded into the health care bill. Union health insurance funds only have about 30 cents available to cover each dollar of anticipated claims, according to the Lewin Group and other research firms.

There's more. Sections 123, 124 and 2251 of H.R. 3200 all create new avenues for union control on newly formed committees that administration officials could stack with union appointees.

Meanwhile, the Senate version includes language that could force home health care workers to into unions. California has a set the precedent here by re-classifying these workers as public employees for the purpose of collective bargaining.

We've paid billions to bail out the UAW. We distort education to help the NEA. Why should health care be any different?

Refusing to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall

Rich Lowry rightly excoriates Barack Obama for refusing the invitation to appear at the ceremony celebrating the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As Lowry points out, Obama was plenty happy to take time out to go to Berlin in the middle of a busy campaign in order to...celebrate himself. But celebrating the triumph of the West over communism? He's too busy.

Obama famously made a speech in Berlin during last year's campaign -- but at an event devoted to celebrating himself as the apotheosis of world hopefulness. He said of 1989, "A wall came down, a continent came together and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."

The line was typical Obama verbal soufflé -- soaring but vulnerable to collapse upon the slightest jostling from logic or historical fact. The wall came down only after the free world resolutely stood against the Communist bloc.

Rather than a warm-and-fuzzy exercise in global understanding, the Cold War was another iteration of the 20th century's long war between totalitarianism and Western liberalism. The West prevailed on the back of American strength.

But Obama doesn't think in such antiquated, triumphalist terms. Given to apologizing for his nation abroad, he resolutely downplays American leadership.

Note the passive expression in Obama's formulation. The wall "came down." No human actors seem to have been involved in either putting it up in the first place or bringing it down 20 years ago. And the world didn't stand "as one." If ever there was an event when the world was not standing as one - it was the Cold War. Presidents from Harry Truman on fought against Soviet-style communism. Even when meeting with communist leaders from the Soviet Union, presidents still applauded the principles of liberty for all. Not Obama.

Obama has relegated this aspirational aspect of American power to the back seat. For him, we are less an exceptional power than one among many, seeking deals with our peers in Beijing and Moscow. Why would Obama want to celebrate the refuseniks of the Eastern Bloc, when he won't even meet with the Dalai Lama in advance of his trip to China?

So Obama huddles with Merkel during her visit to Washington and leaves it at that. An American president will skip events marking the end of a struggle to which we, as a nation, under presidents of both parties, devoted blood and treasure for 50 years. For Barack Obama, 1989 is just another far-away year -- and the Democratic Party of such men as Harry S. Truman and JFK has never seemed more distant.

There is something very revealing about his choice not to attend this celebration. And what it reveals is a president quite disengaged from one of the bright moments in our nation's history.

They're already stealing the election in New Jersey

John Fund details all the ways that the Democrats are counting on fraud or, at the very least, stretching the election rules, to help them in the tight election there.

The race for governor in New Jersey is so close in final polls that it may well end up in a recount -- the 1981 election did and was decided by less than 1,800 votes. If there is a recount, you can bet disputes about absentee ballots will loom large. Moreover, if serious allegations of fraud emerge, you can also expect less-than-vigorous investigation by the Obama Justice Department -- which showed just how seriously it takes such allegations when it walked away from an open-and-shut voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia earlier this year.

Plenty of reasons exist for suspecting absentee fraud may play a significant role in tomorrow's Garden State contests. Groups associated with Acorn in neighboring Pennsylvania and New York appear to have moved into the state. An independent candidate for mayor in Camden has already leveled charges that voter fraud is occurring in his city. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party in New Jersey is taking advantage of a new loosely written vote-by-mail law to pressure county clerks not to vigorously use signature checks to evaluate the authenticity of absentee ballots, the only verification procedure allowed.

Read the rest. The Republicans need to learn how to cruise through hospitals, nursing homes, and Hispanic neighborhoods with absentee ballot forms if they want to level the playing field. It's really disgusting that, in this day and age, we're still talking about this sort of fraud. If it's not close, their cheating won't help them. But the Republicans might as well surrender now if it looks to be close.

Even a lib thinks Frank Rich is being loony

Jonathan Chait, no conservative right-winger, takes Frank Rich to task for his anti-Republican screed.

So wait. Some GOP hacks appointed a relative moderate to represent a district that could probably sustain a much more conservative representative, and conservatives are trying to elect a more right-wing alternative. What exactly is the problem here? Rich paints Scozzafava's heresies as minor. But suppose this was a solidly Democratic district, and party bosses put forward an anti-stimulus, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights nominee. Would Rich really oppose a liberal campaign to elect a more like-minded representative? Would he employ such virtiolic [sic] metaphors? There's a lesson here about making a moral cause out of a procedural argument you're not prepared to back in opposite circumstances.

And we can see an almost perfect exposure of Rich's hypocrisy in his contented acceptance of Ned Lamont's ouster of Joe Lieberman. I think Rich is suffering from Republican Derangement Syndrome.

How bad is the Pelosi bill?

It is bad in every way imaginable. The WSJ looks at the multiple faults of this bill. Read the whole thing, but here are some samples.

Even so, the House disguises hundreds of billions of dollars in additional costs with budget gimmicks. It "pays for" about six years of program with a decade of revenue, with the heaviest costs concentrated in the second five years. The House also pretends Medicare payments to doctors will be cut by 21.5% next year and deeper after that, "saving" about $250 billion. ObamaCare will be lucky to cost under $2 trillion over 10 years; it will grow more after that.

• Expanding Medicaid, gutting private Medicare. All this is particularly reckless given the unfunded liabilities of Medicare—now north of $37 trillion over 75 years. Mrs. Pelosi wants to steal $426 billion from future Medicare spending to "pay for" universal coverage. While Medicare's price controls on doctors and hospitals are certain to be tightened, the only cut that is a sure thing in practice is gutting Medicare Advantage to the tune of $170 billion. Democrats loathe this program because it gives one of out five seniors private insurance options.

As for Medicaid, the House will expand eligibility to everyone below 150% of the poverty level, meaning that some 15 million new people will be added to the rolls as private insurance gets crowded out at a cost of $425 billion. A decade from now more than a quarter of the population will be on a program originally intended for poor women, children and the disabled.

Even though the House will assume 91% of the "matching rate" for this joint state-federal program—up from today's 57%—governors would still be forced to take on $34 billion in new burdens when budgets from Albany to Sacramento are in fiscal collapse. Washington's budget will collapse too, if anything like the House bill passes.

And, as WSJ reminds us, all this is a feature, not a bug.

All of this is intentional, even if it isn't explicitly acknowledged. The overriding liberal ambition is to finish the work began decades ago as the Great Society of converting health care into a government responsibility. Mr. Obama's own Medicare actuaries estimate that the federal share of U.S. health dollars will quickly climb beyond 60% from 46% today. One reason Mrs. Pelosi has fought so ferociously against her own Blue Dog colleagues to include at least a scaled-back "public option" entitlement program is so that the architecture is in place for future Congresses to expand this share even further.

As Congress's balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can't regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.

Mr. Obama rode into office on a wave of "change," but we doubt most voters realized that the change Democrats had in mind was making health care even more expensive and rigid than the status quo. Critics will say we are exaggerating, but we believe it is no stretch to say that Mrs. Pelosi's handiwork ranks with the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act as among the worst bills Congress has ever seriously contemplated.

She'll twist enough Blue Dog arms to get some version of this monstrosity passed. That is the power of the Speaker of the House. What we'll have to wait and see is if 60 Democrats in the Senate will vote for this. I am not optimistic. We can talk about how unpopular such a bill would be and the backlash that there might be in 2010. But it would still be law and, just like Social Security and Medicare, become a future financial liability that will never, ever be repealed.

The California model vs. the Texas Model

William Voegli contrasts the models that have been used to govern California: high taxes and higher benefits with Texas's model: low taxes and lower benefits. Basically, it is the contrast between liberal and conservative policies. So which has been more successful?

It's not surprising, then, that there's an intense debate over which model is more admirable and sustainable. What is surprising is the growing evidence that the low-benefit/low-tax package not only succeeds on its own terms but also according to the criteria used to defend its opposite. In other words, the superior public goods that supposedly justify the high taxes just aren't being delivered.

California and Texas are not perfect representatives of the alternative deals, but they come close. Overall, the Census Bureau's latest data show that state and local government expenditures for all purposes in 2005-06 were 46.8% higher in California than in Texas: $10,070 per person compared with $6,858. Only three states and the District of Columbia saw higher per capita government outlays than California, while those expenditures in Texas were lower than in all but seven states. California ranked 10th in overall taxes levied by state and local governments, on a per capita basis, while Texas, one of only seven states with no individual income tax, was 38th.

Under one measure, people are voting with their feet as there is more out-migration from California to other states and in-migration from other states to Texas.

But California is also losing when contrasted on the delivery of public policies.

Today's public benefits fail that test, as urban scholar Joel Kotkin of NewGeography.com and Chapman University told the Los Angeles Times in March: "Twenty years ago, you could go to Texas, where they had very low taxes, and you would see the difference between there and California. Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California's government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class."

These judgments are not based on drive-by sociology. According to a report issued earlier this year by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., Texas students "are, on average, one to two years of learning ahead of California students of the same age," even though per-pupil expenditures on public school students are 12% higher in California. The details of the Census Bureau data show that Texas not only spends its citizens' dollars more effectively than California but emphasizes priorities that are more broadly beneficial. Per capita spending on transportation was 5.9% lower in California, and highway expenditures in particular were 9.5% lower, a discovery both plausible and infuriating to any Los Angeles commuter losing the will to live while sitting in yet another freeway traffic jam.

However, there is one area in which California is king.

In what respects, then, does California "excel"? California's state and local government employees were the best compensated in America, according to the Census Bureau data for 2006. And the latest posting on the website of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility shows 9,223 former civil servants and educators receiving pensions worth more than $100,000 a year from California's public retirement funds. The "dues" paid by taxpayers in order to belong to Club California purchase benefits that, increasingly, are enjoyed by the staff instead of the members.

Ah, the perfect liberal vision of government: higher taxes and more public employees.

California is subsisting now through handouts from the federal government. What if those handouts stop coming?

If, on the other hand, America's taxpayers (and China's bond buyers) succumb to bailout fatigue, California may reach the point at which, after every alternative has been exhausted, it is forced to try governing itself competently. You wouldn't know it from putting up with California's transportation and educational systems, but there actually is a principled, plausible argument to be made for the high-benefit/high-tax model. For the sake of both California and their own political ideals, its advocates ought to be leading the charge against every excess and inefficiency that deprives taxpayers of good value for their dollars. That won't happen until they stand up to their coalition partners by breaking their Faustian political bargain with California's self-serving governmental-industrial complex.

Sadly, the Obama administration has adopted the California model instead of the Texas model. Unfortunately, there is no one to bail out the federal government. Perhaps that is why Robert Samuelson is writing today to ponder the possibility of the United States going broke.

More clarity on the administration's job count from the stimulus

Edward Lazear, an economist at Stanford and former head of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, explains why we shouldn't put all that much faith in the administration's count of exactly how many jobs their stimulus programs have "created or saved."

fter reporting GDP, the government released new numbers claiming that the stimulus programs have "created or saved" over a million jobs. These data were collected from responses by government agencies that received federal funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Agencies were required to report "an estimate of the number of jobs created and the number of jobs retained by the project or activity." This report is required of all recipients (generally private contractors) of agency funds.

Unfortunately, these data are not reliable indicators of job creation nor of the even vaguer notion of job retention. There are two major problems. The first and most obvious is reporting bias. Recipients have strong incentives to inflate their reported numbers. In a race for federal dollars, contractors may assume that the programs that show the most job creation may be favored by the government when it allocates additional stimulus funds.

No dishonesty on the part of recipients is implied or required. But when a hire conceivably can be classified as resulting from the stimulus money, recipients have every incentive to classify the hire as such. Classification as stimulus-induced is even more likely if a respondent must only say that, except for the money, an employee would have been fired. In this case, no hiring need occur at all.

He notes another problem with the data collection - we don't know if these were new hires who were previously unemployed or if they were hires who came from other jobs.

When the government reports this figure, it wants us to believe that the new hires came from the pool of the unemployed and that they are net additions to the stock of employed workers. But the data do not speak to the number of workers who left their current jobs to fill government-sponsored jobs.

If the vacancies that are created as these workers move from their old firms to government-sponsored projects go unfilled, then these job-to-job transitions are negatives that must be subtracted from the positives. And in an economy that is growing on the basis of productivity improvements rather than more workers employed, firms may wait to fill vacated jobs.

Because these data do not tell us where the workers come from and what happens to the slots they leave, the numbers cannot answer the ultimate question: How many net jobs were created? A similar point holds for those who are reported as retained, only in this case the issue is that some of those retained would have moved to different jobs rather than to the pool of unemployed had they been let go. The government is reporting the gross positive figures, not the relevant net figures.

The administration reported that precise number of jobs created or saved - 640,329, but now we find out that not only was that number created by estimates from the reporting employers, but that it's not including jobs that were lost. The number is phony from top to bottom. However, as Professor Lazear points out, we do have a tried and trusted way to measure employment.

Each month, the Department of Labor reports hires and layoffs from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (Jolts). The Jolts data revealed that in August 2009 more than four million workers were hired. But, unlike the administration's new jobs-created-or-saved data, the Jolts data also tell us that in the same month about 4.3 million workers lost their jobs.

As a result, the labor market lost over a couple hundred thousand jobs. It would be misleading to examine only the hires without also looking at job losses when evaluating the conditions of the labor market, but that is exactly what the stimulus job accounting does.

Net labor market figures do exist. Administrations have always been held to the time-tested and well-understood monthly job numbers put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reports the unemployment rate and the net job gain or loss for the economy as a whole. It is important to use reliable, accurate and well-understood numbers to determine the true causes of recovery. The unemployment rate, now at 9.8%, has continued to rise, and job losses have remained at high levels throughout the stimulus period. Few will be comforted by the good-news-only claim that the stimulus "created or saved" over one million jobs.

The administration's claim just comes off as a desperate phony claim to give Democrats a talking point about why the President's policies are working. They don't care about how shaky those date are - all they care about is the talking point. Unfortunately, for those out of work, spin on employment numbers does them no good at all.

A little Pelosi gift for the trial lawyers

Jennifer Rubin reports on this little present in Pelosi's bill for the trial lawyers.

Remember Obama’s effort to try a “test” for tort reform? (We don’t actually need a test, since it has worked to lower medical malpractice coverage and help increase access to doctors in states that have tried it.) Well, Pelosi’s bill has an anti-tort-reform measure. On pages 1431-1433 of the 1990 spellbinder, there is a financial incentive for states to try “alternative medical liability laws.” But look — you don’t get the incentive if you have a law that would “limit attorneys’ fees or impose caps on damages.”

That’s what the trial lawyers get for the millions spent in supporting the Democratic party, and that’s what tort “reform” in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of health-care legislation amounts to. States will be strong-armed into repealing existing caps in order to get the Fed’s money. Sweet, huh? Well, unless you thought the aim was to reduce medical costs. No, this will go a long way toward ensuring that tort lawyers remain rich, malpractice insurance remains high, and unnecessary defensive medicine remains a fixture of the health-care system. Nice going, Nancy!

So much for Obama's offer to try out a little tort reform. Instead we get language that explicitly limits states from implementing any limit on attorneys' feels or any caps on damages. As Ed Morrissey points out, the CBO itself has estimated that tort reform could save $54 billion over ten years. But the Democrats would rather spend money than save money by doing something that such a potent supporter of their party wouldn't like.

Created or saved: What does it all mean?

Critics have been ridiculing the stock administration formulation about the jobs they've "saved or created." As just about everyone has pointed out, there is absolutely no way to measure jobs that were saved. And now Politico has found a way to reveal that the White House itself has no idea.

White House officials announced Friday that they had counted exactly how many jobs were created or saved by recent stimulus spending: 640,329.

So how many were saved and how many created? They don’t know.

In a briefing with reporters, officials acknowledged they can’t tell the difference between jobs “saved,” and jobs “created” by the $787 billion stimulus package.

If they're so bent on using this phony construct of "saved" jobs, shouldn't they have an idea of what it means and how many they actually saved? But since it's a designation that can't be measured, they are at as much of a loss as everyone else as to what "saved" jobs actually means.

The White House said 325,000 jobs were saved or created in the education sector – where many jobs are in the “saved” category as states used stimulus dollars to plug massive budget gaps that could have led to teacher layoffs. Another 80,000 are construction jobs.

Still, Jared Bernstein, the chief economist and senior economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, said he is confident that the stimulus bill “saved or created over a million jobs, and we’re on track to save or create the 3.5 million jobs we estimated over the life of the recovery act.”

And, he conceded, “there’s no data element in any government data set that is absolutely precise.”

They can't be precise, yet they've come out with a report that counts down to the last digit how many jobs were supposedly created or saved - 640,329. Sounds like precision to me.

And how did they figure out how many jobs had been saved - well, they just trusted people to report it correctly to them.

The issue of whether governments can accurately count jobs “saved” – since that is a hypothetical has provoked debate among economists since the White House began using the “saved or created” formulation earlier this year. Critics have argued that the recipients of the data have every incentive to inflate the number of jobs they planned to cut if they hadn’t gotten federal money. But DeSeve said that the White House left it up to the people reporting the numbers to make that determination for themselves. “What we have to do is rely on the fact that our public officials are honest,” he said. “We don’t differentiate in the reporting between created and saved jobs.”

Doesn't that make you feel so much better about how they measured those jobs to the exact digit?

And I hope they weren't counting these jobs in Colorado in their precise total.

The federal government reported Friday that Colorado created or saved 8,094 jobs through grants, loans and contracts funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Problem is, the figure is wrong, according to an analysis of recovery.gov data by The Denver Post.

Although a Colorado Springs Head Start program reported it had created or preserved 269 jobs, the real number was three, according to an interview with a program manager. And although the largest private contract in the state funded with stimulus dollars was estimated at $166 million, the number was off by tens of millions, apparently because of a data-entry error, contract information shows.

Oops.

Thanks, but no thanks, Frank Rich

It's always sweetly generous when liberals seek to give their advice or analysis of conservatives. Usually the result is similar to Frank Rich's conniption fit today about New York's special election in district 23. Apparently, the failure of the candidate chosen in a back-room by county leaders, Dede Scozzafava, to maintain support among Republicans is reason enough for Frank Rich to trot out the following terms for conservatives and their actions: conservatives are fighting on a "killing field," they're "a wacky, paranoid cult," a "wrecking crew," joining in a putsch," following Palin in a "Pavlovian rush," engaged in a "double-barreled suicide." The right is demonstrating its "seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes." He pulls out liberal historian Richard Hofstadter who was similarly appalled by the conservatives of his era to label them in 1964 as paranoids, a term that Rich fully endorses for today's conservatives or, as he so crudely prefers "teabaggers" or, more hyperbolically, "Stalinists." Whew! That's a lot of hate to put forth against conservatives. And a lot of rabid rhetoric to employ in a single column. Can he possibly write about conservatives without employing metaphors of violence?

But don't get Frank Rich wrong. He's actually happy about all this because he thinks that it will result in Republicans losing even more than they did in 2006 and 2008.

Funny, but ol' Frank was nowhere as upset when liberal Moveon types excommunicated Joe Lieberman from the Democratic Party in 2006. In fact, he was quite happy to give Ned Lamont his seal of approval for Lamont's opposition to the Iraq War. Indeed, he was happy that liberal bloggers had forced through Lieberman's defeat in the Democratic primary.

Their generalizations about the blogosphere are overheated; the shrillest left-wing voices on the Internet are no more representative of the whole than those of the far right. This country remains a country of the center, and opposition to the war in Iraq is now the center and (if you listen to Chuck Hagel and George Will, among other non-neoconservatives) even the center right.

See, when liberal bloggers work in a party primary to oust the party's incumbent that is just representative of the voters following the center. When conservative bloggers band together to oppose a liberal candidate in a special election that is Stalinist.

Why the choice of a liberal New York assemblywoman by a few county poobahs should have the sanctity of the Word from on high is beyond me. It's one thing to support a liberal Republican in areas where a conservative has no chance, but in a district that has voted for a Republican since the 19th century, despite having gone for Obama last year, the Republican Party could have picked someone to run who didn't support Obama's stimulus package and card check, as well as being a supporter of Big Labor. When people found out about her record, her poll numbers sank precipitously. So she's dropped out and endorsed...the Democrat in the race. Some loss she is to the Republican Party. So much for her claim to having been a Republican all her life and planning to be one until the day she dies. As an Instapundit reader points out,

“Scozzafava hasn’t just proven her critics right, she’s also made fools of the GOP establishment that backed her. The establishment argument for supporting Scozzafava boiled down to an appeal to party loyalty, and Scozzafava just demonstrated that she has none. Gingrich et al asked voters to compromise their values on behalf of a candidate who turned on them the first chance she got. The voters won’t forget that.” Ouch.

But conservatives don't need Frank Rich to tell us how to vote or whom to support. If he wants to get his jollies by thinking that a GOP victory in NY-23 will be a looming disaster for the Republican Party, that's just fine. Clearly, he has no idea of what the people he calls "teabaggers" are upset about. And even worse, this drama critic-turned-political pundit is missing what has really been happening. As Jonah Goldberg points out, the gains that Republicans have been making in the areas holding elections this week are among independents.

The story is not that the GOP is self-destructing, it is that the conventional wisdom is being shown to be ludicrous. For some time now Frank Rich, Sam Tanenhaus and countless others (including David Frum) have been arguing that the GOP is a rump party and the only way for it to survive is for it to embrace me-too Republicanism of one flavor or another. The story of all three major races (VA, NJ, and NY-23) is that this conventional wisdom was incandescently wrong and ill-advised. Hoffman and McDonnell owe their success to the support of independents (the independents all of these people said wanted moderate, Democrat-lite policies) and to Republicans determined to stay true to conservative principles. Not only was the conventional wisdom wrong, the idea that there's a "civil war" within the GOP revolving around this argument is nonsense. The GOP is an unapologetically conservative party, providing a choice not an echo, and — horror of horrors — it's working.

I think I'll go with Goldberg's read on conservatives any day before I'd buy into Frank Rich's analysis. Rich might have his finger on the pulse of the liberal CW, but he just doesn't get conservatives. Perhaps he doesn't read the competition and so he missed this headline from the Washington Post, "Independents flocking to McDonnell." Sure doesn't sound like Rich's image of a suicidal rush of Stalinists.