ON AMERICA GOING SOFT

President Obama recently said America was going "soft"--here is a response from Vodkapundit.

A CONSERVATIVE IN CHICAGO

A bit of a pariah at parties.

CHRISTIANS IN POLITICS

An interesting interview with Tim Goeglein (advisor in the Bush White House and an evangelical Christian). He plagiarized in a column he wrote and had to resign. It is a case of ethical failure and how he and President Bush responded to it.

OBAMA'S STIMULUS PLAN, 2011 VERSION

From the Chicago Sun-Times--his numbers just don't make sense. But what caught my attention was the following: . . .the Department of Energy’s program of $40 billion in loan guarantees to promote green energy. Half the money has been spent to create a total of 3,545 direct jobs, according to a Washington Post analysis, That’s $5.6 million per job. But rest assured, the DOE says once the full $40 billion in financing is disbursed, 60,000 jobs will be found — more than $666,000 for each new worker.

2012 ELECTION PREDICTION

Steve Forbes predicts Rick Perry will win the Republican presidential nomination and the election in 2012. I am not so sure. You can say Steve Forbes has a feel for politics in the past given his failed campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in past years.

NEW WAR STRATEGY IN MIDDLE EAST

The Obama administration is finally doing something that I think the Bush administration should have implemented. The use of drone bases: Overall, officials said, the cluster of bases reflects an effort to have wider geographic coverage, greater leverage with countries in the region and backup facilities if individual airstrips are forced to close.

THE TEXAS ECONOMY & RICK PERRY

There has been a debate on whether Texas has done as well economically under Governor Rick Perry as his now budding presidential campaign is touting. This article shows that on the whole Texas has done better than the rest of the US. . .and it comes from a Democrat.

REZA KAHLILI ON IRAN

Reza Kahlili (a pseudonym) became a spy for the CIA following Khomeini's takeover in Iran. He has written a book on his work with the CIA called "Time to Betray." I find it an excellent read which gives a lot of insight into what was happening. I also did some research on him because some believe that his information has been inaccurate or they think he has a political agenda.

Since then he has published articles on what is happening in Iran. The CIA has challenged some of his predictions, but it looks to me that his information and predictions on what is happening in Iran is more accurate than what the CIA or Obama administration's State department is saying about Iran.

Michael Totten has an excellent interview with him. The Shiite regime in Iran is expecting the return of the 12th Imam or Mahdi. This belief plays a role in Iranian foreign policy which I am not sure secularists understand.

US MILITARY RESPONSE TO 9/11

An interesting story about a female pilot who was sent up to take down United Flight 93, but she had no ammunition on the plane. She would have had to ram the United flight with her F-16--in effect she would have been a suicide pilot.

COMMENTS ON OBAMA'S 9/8/11 SPEECH

It doesn't look like it overwhelmed liberals or conservatives.

Mickey Kaus reacts with some good evaluation of the speech style.

AP Factcheck finds some problem with truth-telling.

Andrew Sullivan liked it.

From WAPO columnist Jennifer Rubin. President Obama tonight seemed simultaneously angry and nervous as he rushed through a speech that was transparently not worthy of a joint session of Congress. His great idea: Cobble together a mish-mash of old ideas (infrastructure spending, a payroll tax cut) and pay for it later, by asking the debt commission to come up with additional deficit reductions later, preferably by hiking taxes on the rich. The second half of the speech was a heated campaign rally aimed at a cartoon version of his future opponent.

Ira Stoll. The problem was that Mr. Obama couched all this in a speech so preachy, insistent, and divisive that it makes the whole thing repellant, no matter what the policy merits. "You should pass it right away," he said, repeating "right away" so often he managed to sound like a cross between a truculent child and an impatient parent.

A LIBERAL PRAISES PALIN'S THINKING

From the NYT.

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).

REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE DEBATE 9/7/2011

Interesting summary of the debate by Michael Barone.

OBAMA & KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS

Presumably (in popular thinking) Obama and his administration's economic policies are based on Keynesian economic theory. It is a legitimate theory, but is obviously not liked by more free-market advocates. But it appears that the administration is not following or advocating what Keynes said to do in an economic downturn.

Keynes was against the very sort of large structural deficits that characterize contemporary federal budgets and policy, believing instead that deficits should be "temporary and self-liquidating." And Keynes believed that any sort of counter-cyclical spending by government should be directed toward increasing private investment, not simply spending current and future tax dollars on public works projects.

If this is true, then the Obama administration is just spending money without theoretical support based on any economic theory.

"OBAMA'S WHOPPER OF A TAX CUT"

The Washington Post is accusing Obama of gross exaggeration and perhaps even misleading the people about the extent of the tax cuts.

Obama’s claim of having passed the “biggest middle-class tax cut in history” is ridiculous. He might have been on more solid ground if he had claimed the “broadest” tax cut, but that doesn’t sound very historic.

CHINA'S GLOBAL INVESTMENTS vs. US ECONOMY

An interesting chart.

And then you look at the net zero job growth for August in the US (the first time this has happened since WW II).

"Though much attention is being paid to ‘zero job growth’ in August, the real news in today’s numbers is that job growth is worse than in recent months, and the nation continues to produce far fewer jobs than needed to meaningfully reduce the unemployment rate," Heidi Shierholz, economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "In fact, in some ways the report was less than zero in that weekly hours fell, as did hourly earnings."

Now the White House is backtracking on the unemployment numbers that its stimulus bills were/are supposed to bring down.