It’s Friday, October 12th, 2012….but before we begin, a couple of quick comments that pretty much sum up our impressions of the VP debate:

SB from CA: “Biden reminded me of the guy in school everybody just wanted to get away from.”

Sorry Joe, but constant interruptions, loud guffaws and idiotic grinning are the hallmarks of a man who doesn’t want an honest factual debate.  Sure, it’s red meat for the faithful to wash down with their Kool-Aid….

….but we’re pretty certain it doesn’t play well in Peoria.

As TW from MD noted, the line of the night might well have been when, after Biden made a lame reference to the “47%”, Ryan suggested it was taken out of context, then remarked, “I think the vice president knows sometimes the words don’t come out of your mouth the right way.”

Sometimes?!?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, we mark with great regret the passing of a true American hero:

Basil Plumley, retired veteran whose book became ‘We Were Soldiers’ movie, dies in Georgia

 

Basil L. Plumley, a renowned career soldier whose exploits as an Army infantryman were portrayed in a book and the movie “We Were Soldiers,” has died at 92 — an age his friends are amazed that he lived to see. Plumley fought in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam and was awarded a medal for making five parachute jumps into combat. The retired command sergeant major died Wednesday.

Friends said Plumley, who died in hospice care in west Georgia, never told war stories and was known to hang up on people who called to interview him. Still, he was near-legendary in the Army and gained more widespread fame through a 1992 Vietnam War book that was the basis for a 2002 movie.

Plumley didn’t need a Hollywood portrayal to be revered among soldiers, said Greg Camp, a retired Army colonel and former chief of staff at neighboring Fort Benning who befriended Plumley in his later years. “He’s iconic in military circles,” Camp said. “Among people who have been in the military, he’s beyond what a movie star would be. … His legend permeates three generations of soldiers.”

Garryowen, Command Sergeant Major!

Debbie Kimble, Plumley’s daughter, said her father died from cancer after spending about nine days at Columbus Hospice. Although the illness seemed to strike suddenly, Kimble said Plumley’s health had been declining since his wife of 63 years, Deurice Plumley, died last May on Memorial Day.

A native of Shady Spring, W.Va., Plumley enlisted in the Army in 1942 and ended up serving 32 years in uniform. In World War II, he fought in the Allied invasion of Italy at Salerno and the D-Day invasion at Normandy. He later fought with the 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment in Korea. In Vietnam, Plumley served as sergeant major — the highest enlisted rank — in the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment.

“That puts him in the rarest of clubs,” said journalist Joseph L. Galloway, who met Plumley while covering the Vietnam War for United Press International and remained lifelong friends with him. “To be combat infantry in those three wars, in the battles he participated in, and to have survived — that is miraculous.”

We’ll remember him best for five stirring words attributed to him by Hal Moore and Joe Galloway; standing erect under fire in the face of a vastly superior enemy force, Plumley chambered a round in his .45 and said to those around him crouching on the ground, “Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves.”

As Hal Moore observed, he was the Lion in Winter.  RIP, Command Sergeant Major.

Moving on, Ross Douthat, writing at the New York Times, courtesy of Conn Carroll, describes what he views as….

Liberalism’s Glass Jaw

 

Right about….THERE!

Last month, Republicans staring at defeat in November alternated between blaming Mitt Romney and blaming the American people, when they should have been looking harder at the flaws in contemporary conservatism. Now that Romney has surged back into contention, liberals are making a similar mistake. They’re focusing too intently on the particular weaknesses of President Obama’s debate performance, rather than on the weaknesses in Obama-era liberalism that last Wednesday’s Denver showdown left exposed.

Four years ago, the Obama presidency was hailed as the beginning of an extended liberal renaissance — a new New Deal, a resurrected Camelot, a return to the glory days of Lyndon Johnson before Vietnam wrecked his presidency. Health care reform was the highest priority, but it was supposed to be only the beginning. With the Democrats enjoying huge Congressional majorities, everything seemed to be on the table: immigration reform, a program to combat climate change, card-check legislation, a wave of trust-busting in the banking sector — and at the least, the very least, a return to Clinton-era tax rates.

There is no world in which all of these hopes could have been perfectly realized. But the ways in which they’ve been disappointed have delivered some hard lessons. It isn’t just that Obama failed to live up to the (frankly impossible) standard set by his 2008 campaign and the media adoration that accompanied it. It’s that the nature of his failures speak to the limits of the liberal project, and the tensions and contradictions within the liberal coalition.

Sometimes Obama-era liberalism has disappointed because it has failed outright. The defeat of cap-and-trade legislation and the stillborn push for immigration reform exposed the deep fissures within the Democratic Party, and particularly the divide between the enlightened do-goodism of the party’s upper-middle-class supporters and the economic interests of its remaining blue-collar constituents.

The steadily worsening deficit picture, meanwhile, has been a reminder that an expanding government balance sheet makes sense only if you can persuade taxpayers to pay more to cover it, which Obama’s party hasn’t done. More important, given the limit to how much money can be extracted from the wealthy, it makes sense only if you persuade middle class taxpayers to pay more, which Obama’s party hasn’t even tried to do. (Because the Dims know they won’t!)

But the Obama administration’s legislative successes have offered hard lessons to liberals as well. Indeed, it’s the failures of the successes, if you will, that have cast the longest shadow across his re-election effort.

First, there was the failure of stimulus bill to deliver anything like the kind of rebound that Obama’s technocrats confidently projected. This failure isn’t necessarily an indictment of the theory behind Keynesian economics. But at the very least it exposes two limitations on Keynesianism in practice: the difficulties that even experts can have assessing the true state of the economy, and the ways in which the push and pull of democratic politics makes it difficult to simply keep throwing money at a problem.

Then came the White House’s failure to sell the public on its health care bill, which exacerbated the stimulus’s underperformance — by leading to months of wrangling when Washington should have been reckoning with the economy instead — and then cost the Democrats dearly at the polls in 2010. This failure of salesmanship doesn’t in and of itself discredit the bill’s provisions. But at the very least it demonstrates that the redistributive policies liberals favor will be accepted only if they’re founded on a secure base of economic growth — growth that Obama’s policies, unlike F.D.R.’s (?!?) or L.B.J.’s, have conspicuously failed to produce.

More broadly, all of Obama’s signature accomplishments have tended to have the same weakness in common: They have been weighed down by interest-group payoffs and compromised by concessions to powerful insiders, from big pharma (which stands to profit handsomely from the health care bill) to the biggest banks (which were mostly protected by the Dodd-Frank financial reform). It may have been an empty rhetorical gesture, but the fact that Romney could actually out-populist the president on “too big to fail” during the last debate speaks to the Obama-era tendency for liberalism to blur into a kind of corporatism, in which big government intertwines with big business rather than restraining it.

Again, every administration has its share of disappointments, and every ideology has to make concessions to political reality. But what we don’t see in this campaign cycle is much soul-searching from Democrats about the ways in which their agenda hasn’t worked out as planned. (Let alone why most of it will never work!)

Instead, in a country facing a continued unemployment crisis and a looming deficit crunch, liberals have rallied behind a White House whose only real jobs program is “stay the course” and whose plan to deal with long-term deficits relies on the woefully insufficient promise to tax the 1 percent. When Obama insiders wax optimistic about what a second term might bring, they mostly talk about pursuing legislation on climate change and immigration yet again, without explaining why things will turn out differently this time around.

This lack of a plausible vision, more than his stutters and missed opportunities, is what doomed the president in last week’s debate. His responses to Romney were strikingly backward-looking — alternating between “we’re already doing that” and “we tried that under Republicans, and it didn’t work,” and rarely pivoting effectively to “here’s what we should do next.”

It’s not that Romney offered some detailed, brilliantly persuasive alternative. He didn’t, and couldn’t, because his party has at best a sketch of a policy agenda rather than a blueprint. But Romney isn’t running for re-election, and this was a case where merely seeming forward-looking, energetic and reassuring was enough to remind Americans of all the ways that the Obama era has disappointed them — and in so doing, sent shivers down liberalism’s glass jaw.

We must strenuously object with Mr. Douthat’s insinuation the policies of FDR or LBJ provided a “secure base for economic growth”.

The only policy Roosevelt ever enacted which spurred economic growth was ordering the Pacific Fleet to Pearl Harbor, a move which all but guaranteed America’s entry into WWII, the only reason the country ever emerged from the Great Depression.

Johnson ruined the American economy with this “guns and butter” policies, and bequeathed to America the Great Society programs which have eviscerated our cities, enslaved generations of our poor and which will, unchecked, eventually strangle our economy.

Other than that, and his hesitancy to term Obamascare the disaster it is, I think we enjoyed the play, Mrs. Lincoln.

In another campaign-related item, the WSJ details….

Obama’s Disappearing $5 Trillion

The President’s advisers concede 80% of Romney’s tax-cut math.

 

In last week’s presidential debate, President Obama seemed stunned to learn that the “$5 trillion tax cut” in his talking points, financed by a mythical middle-class tax increase, does not exist in Mitt Romney’s economic plan. But now, even after the Obama campaign staff has acknowledged the error, why won’t the President? (Because….it’s all he’s got?)

At last Wednesday’s debate in Denver, Mr. Romney explained that he doesn’t plan to cut taxes by $5 trillion. This is because, while his plan rolls back individual income tax rates by 20% and cuts the corporate rate to 25% from 35%, he also plans to reduce personal and corporate deductions. The idea is that lower rates but fewer loopholes and the faster economic growth that results can generate a similar amount of tax revenue. The Republican also stated once again that his plan does not include a tax increase on the middle class.

Mr. Romney has been saying this for months, and over the weekend Obama campaign spokesman Jen Psaki conceded 80% of the argument. En route to California with reporters aboard Air Force One, Ms. Psaki said that the elimination of enough deductions and loopholes could in fact cover $3.8 trillion. That becomes $4 trillion if you include fewer interest payments on less debt, which means the Obama campaign was saying as of Sunday that the Romney “tax cut” was $1 trillion, not $5 trillion. ($1 trillion here, $4 trillion there; it’s not like we’re talking about real money!)

But soon after Air Force One landed, it became clear that either Mr. Obama hadn’t gotten the memo—or didn’t like what it said. At a Los Angeles fundraiser, Mr. Obama repeated the bogus claim that his own campaign had just repudiated. The President said, “And when my opponent proposes $5 trillion worth of tax cuts, $2 trillion of additional military spending that our military is not asking for, and doesn’t provide a single detail on how to pay for it, what that means is either we’re going to be blowing up the deficit or we’re going to be sticking it to folks who can’t afford it.”

So the Romney campaign and the Obama campaign agree that President Obama is wrong. There is no $5 trillion tax cut. But before retreating to Ms. Psaki’s seemingly more reasonable $1 trillion figure, Mr. Obama should think twice.

Turns out there’s trouble with that estimate too. Princeton economics professor Harvey Rosen, cited by the Obama campaign as a source for the claim that the Romney plan must raise taxes on the middle-class to avoid increasing the deficit, now says that Team Obama has been misrepresenting his research.

In fact, his work shows that increased economic growth from a more efficient tax code and lower marginal tax rates will allow Mr. Romney to cut rates and deductions while avoiding both a rate hike on the middle class and a deficit increase. Maybe Mr. Romney’s reasonable, coherent explanation for this is why he won the debate.

That….and the fact The Obamao has no plan whatsoever to deal with the mess he’s created.

And if you’re wondering why so many like us have lost faith in just about every poll out there, Jay Cost, courtesy of The Weekly Standard, offers one answer:

Politics and the Gallup Poll

 

Since about the beginning of President Obama’s tenure, the Gallup poll has generally been one of the least positive polls for the Democratic party. This has prompted outrage and pressure from the left–even from presidential advisor David Axelrod.

Over the summer Mark Blumenthal of Huffington Post wrote a critique of Gallup’s daily presidential job approval poll. The point of which was that Gallup was over-sampling whites and thus understating President Obama’s position in the adult population. I responded by arguing that Blumenthal’s case was underdeveloped and less-than-met-the-eye, and that was basically where things stood.

Until, that is, this week. President Obama enjoyed a bounce in his Gallup job approval number after the Democratic National Convention, as was to be expected, but there was a twist: it did not disappear. And while Gallup on average had found Obama’s job approval around 47 percent with adults through most of 2012, for the last five weeks it has been regularly above 50 percent. Yesterday, it stood at 53 percent, a number we have not really seen since 2009.

It is even more problematic to make the shift but not spell out in detail the political effect of it. One utility of the Gallup tracker was that it enabled comparisons across time. Those are now difficult to accomplish because we have to assume what effect these methodological shifts have had. My guess is that it has moved the needle toward Obama by maybe 3 points on job approval, but we cannot know for sure. We also have no idea the extent to which this changes the Romney-Obama head-to-head among registered or likely voters.

What Gallup should have done is similar to what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does when it adjusts the unemployment rate to account for new Census data: Give the number as it is now calculated and as it would have been calculated absent the change, so everybody can know exactly what effect the changes in assumptions have had. Newport fails even to acknowledge whether and how this methodological change helped one side over the other, let alone its extent.

Final point: We absolutely, positively must remember polling in 2012 is politicized as never before, and it is incumbent upon the consumers of political polls not to accept the data naïvely, but to perform due diligence to see what goes into the product.

In other words, caveat emptor, baby!

In a related bit of Latin, here’s today’s Environmental Moment, courtesy of the AEI‘s Mark Perry:

‘Carpe oleum’ (seize the oil): North Dakota’s exponential oil production sets additional records in August

 

The “Economic Miracle State” of North Dakota pumped another record amount of crude oil during the month of August, surpassing 700,000 barrels per day for the first time ever, according to data released today by the state’s Department of Mineral Resources.  Total oil production in August exceeded 21 million barrels for the first time in state history, establishing another new record for monthly oil output.  Here are some other highlights of North Dakota’s record-setting oil output in August:

1) The state’s oil production in August was 57% above a year ago, and followed annual increases of 59% in July and 72% in June.

2) North Dakota produced 73% more oil than Alaska in August, marking the sixth consecutive month that North Dakota has out-produced Alaska.  The Peace Garden State surpassed Alaska’s oil production for the first time in March to become the country’s new No. 2 oil state, second now only to first-ranked Texas.

3) The number of active oil wells in North Dakota increased to 7,408 in August establishing a new state record.  Over the last year through August, an average of almost seven new oil wells were put into production every business day, and each of those new wells is the equivalent of adding a new $8-10 million business to the state’s economy, see recent CD post for more details.

4) The amount of oil produced per active well in North Dakota increased in August to a new record-high of 2,906 barrels during the month of August, which was 20% above the oil output per well  a year ago, and likely reflects the increased efficiency gains from advanced drilling technologies like “pad drilling” that are gaining popularity.

As a result of the state’s oil boom, North Dakota continues to lead the nation with the lowest state unemployment rate at 3% in August, and almost five percentage points below the national average of 7.8%.  There were nine North Dakota counties with jobless rates below 2.0% in July, and Williams County, which is at the center of the Bakken oil boom, continues to boast the lowest county jobless rate in the country at just 0.8%.  The exponential growth in North Dakota oil production has fueled exponential growth in the state’s oil and gas jobs, which have tripled in less than three years.  Overall employment throughout the entire state has increased 6.4% over the last twelve months, more than six times the tepid 1.0% pace of job growth nationally during that period.

Bottom Line: August was another record-setting month for oil production in North Dakota and the energy-related boom there continues to make it the most economically successful state in America, with record levels of employment and income growth, the lowest state jobless rate in the country, a state budget surplus of $1.6 billion, the lowest home foreclosure rate in the country, strong housing and construction markets, thousands of landowners who have become millionaires from oil royalties, and jobless rates in nine of the state’s counties below 2.0%.  North Dakota’s economic success, job creation, and energy-based prosperity is being driven by the development of the state’s vast energy resources, especially the ocean of shale oil in the state’s Bakken region, which supplied 91% of the state’s oil in August.  It’s an economic model that could easily spread energy prosperity elsewhere if more domestic energy resources were opened up to greater exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas.

Suggested state motto for North Dakota: “Carpe Oleum” (“seize the oil”).

Update: At more than 700,000 barrels per day (bpd), North Dakota is now producing almost as much oil as the countries of Egypt (719,000 bpd) and Argentina (723,000 bpd).  At the current rate of production increases, it’s possible that North Dakota will be producing more than one million bpd of oil by the middle of next year and the state will then surpass oil output in the following countries: Indonesia (923,000 bpd), Oman (927,000 bpd), India (945,000 bpd), Colombia (960,000 bpd), and the U.K. (982,000 bpd).

The best part?  It’s all despite every effort of Team Tick-Tock to the contrary!

Next up, it’s the Money Quote, courtesy today of James Taranto and Best of the Web reader Michael Segal:

“My wife remembers an interview with William F. Buckley back in the 1970s, when he predicted that our whole generation that left college after Watergate would shun politics as dirty, and the nation would suffer as a result. Instead, my classmates who were interested in public affairs went into journalism and made it dirty.“

On the Lighter Side….

Next up, the latest in cutting edge automobile design for Saudi women, courtesy of Bob Chagares….

….and this rendering of the results of the first debate, brought to us by Hal Vasvari:

Finally, we’ll call it a week with the Michelle Obama Memorial “Does My Ass Make This Skirt Look Small?” segment, courtesy of AOL.com and a lassie built like a fine ship: broad in the beam!

Jennifer Rogers Denied Job As ‘Kilt Girl,’ Couldn’t Fit Into Skirt

 

Being a food server isn’t glamorous work, but there’s no shortage of restaurateurs these days who insist on hiring attractive, shapely waitresses dolled up in skimpy outfits as a way to woo more customers. The so-called “breastaurant” boom has spurred scrutiny into how managers decide who is right for the job as well as investigations into possible discriminatory hiring.

Jennifer Rogers (above, left) is among those who alleges that she was denied a job because she didn’t have the right body type. Rogers applied at the Tilted Kilt Pub and Eatery in Palm Desert, Calif., but was rejected from job as a “Kilt Girl” when the restaurant’s mandated “uniform” didn’t fit, Rogers told KESQ in Palm Springs.

“Because the skirt was a size too small, they said that I could not work there,” Rogers told the TV station. “I couldn’t wear the uniform.”

The restaurant, which is soon to reopen after a being closed for a year and a half, is one of 65 pubs with locations in 22 states and Canada. The Bakersfield Californian described the chain’s theme as “a sports bar and restaurant that’s sort of Hooters with a Scottish twist.”

Waitresses for the Tempe, Ariz.-based chain are known as “Kilt Girls,” and applicants for the position must “adhere to the established guidelines” and “maintain a costume fit, as detailed in the appearance guidelines.” (The site also features a monthly Kilt Girl, photographed wearing a bikini as well as “current hobbies and goals” and “favorite pub menu item.”)

The listing for jobs at the Palm Desert store noted, “We are entertainers first and servers second.” But Rogers was simply looking for job, and questions why applicants have to look a certain way. “It’s not fair,” she said.

A “size too small”?  Yeah….only if one doesn’t bother to search the web for a full body shot:

Look, we’re not making light of Ms. Rogers physique….but this is like us saying it’s not fair we weren’t drafted by the Lakers.  And why we’re always suspicious of headshots highlighting matters dealing with dimensions below the belt.

 

Magoo