The Hollywood Liberal

Creating Prosperity: Lessons From Milton Friedman
Stephen Moore, WSJ
It's a tragedy that Milton Friedman – born 100 years ago on July 31 – did not live long enough to combat the big-government ideas that have formed the core of Obamanomics. It's perhaps more tragic that our current president, who attended the University of Chicago where Friedman taught for decades, never fell under the influence of the world's greatest champion of the free market. Imagine how much better things would have turned out, for Mr. Obama and the country.Friedman was a constant presence on these pages until his death in 2006 at age 94. If he could, he would surely be…

Culture Does Matter
Mitt Romney, National Review
During my recent trip to Israel, I had suggested that the choices a society makes about its culture play a role in creating prosperity, and that the significant disparity between Israeli and Palestinian living standards was powerfully influenced by it. In some quarters, that comment became the subject of controversy.But what exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture? In the case of the United States, it is a particular kind of culture that has made us the greatest economic power in the history of the earth. Many significant features come to mind: our work ethic, our appreciation for…

Investors Vote to Break Up the Banks
Charles Gasparino, New York Post
Last week, former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill — the guy who created the megabank model — said he’d been wrong, that the big banks should be broken up. But what really unnerved the leaders of the nation’s Too Big To Fail institutions was that the markets reacted with a strong rally in bank stocks.In other words, the most important constituency in the bank-size debate — the investor — thinks smaller is actually better.

Plastic Bag Bans: A Feel-Good Eco-Fad
Todd Myers, RealClearScience
Across the country, cities are joining the latest environmental trend – banning plastic grocery bags. Concerned about the amount of plastic that reaches our oceans and the impact on wildlife, communities have decided that banning the bags is a simple and environmentally responsible approach. But is it? What does the science say? 

The Mysteries of Romney’s Finances
Michael Graetz, New York Times
PRESSURE is mounting for Mitt Romney to release more of his financial records. Mr. Romney has made public only his 2010 tax returns and has said his 2011 documents will be released soon. “That’s all that’s necessary for people to understand something about my finances,” he said recently. He is “simply not enthusiastic,” he also said, about giving the Obama campaign “hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort and lie about.”But it is a good bet that Mr. Romney’s vetters have picked…

How Can Obama Win With This Economy?
Keith Koffler, WH Dossier
There’s just no longer any way to spin this. There is no reason why the economy should not be picking up after three and a half years of the Obama presidency. Unless the problem is the Obama presidency.The Commerce Department announced today that the economy grew only 1.5 percent the second quarter of the year. This is not aberration or hiccup.

Obama Now Partly Running on Clinton’s Record?
Jake Tapper, ABC News
Faced with an stagnating economy and unemployment over 8 percent on his own watch, President Obama on the stump now invokes the economy during the era of former President Bill Clinton.The president’s invocation of Clinton is part of his pitch to raise taxes on higher income brackets, as did President Clinton in 1993; and as a contrast to his current Republican opponents who seek to extend all the Bush-era tax rates, including those on the top wage-earners, which President Obama opposes.

Mitt Stumbles on Every Front in London
Nicholas Watt, The Guardian
If Barack Obama were dreaming up the ideal start to Mitt Romney's first overseas visit as the presumptive Republican nominee, the president might wonder whether his rival could offend the US's historic transatlantic ally. That would obviously be rejected as impossibly ambitious, so the president might then ask himself whether Romney would fail to remember the name of one of his hosts in London.Surely a successful businessman would never make such a basic error. So the president would wonder whether Romney would breach convention by saying in public that he met the head of MI6,…

Candidates Cower on Gun Control

Mitt Romney vs. Stubborn Facts
Donna Brazile, CNN
John Adams once said, “facts are stubborn things.” These days, another Massachusetts politician has found that saying to ring especially true.While it's still unclear how Mitt Romney can be the CEO, chairman, president and sole shareholder of Bain Capital, a company that he claims no responsibility for, it's become increasingly evident that candidate Romney simply doesn't want to talk about the facts of his business record.

The Battle for Ballot Integrity in Pa.
John Hinderaker, Power Line
Pennsylvania is, for the moment, ground zero in the battle over voter fraud. In March, Pennsylvania’s legislature enacted a law that requires identification for voting. The ACLU has sued to enjoin enforcement of the law; a trial on its lawsuit began today and is expected to last for around a week. This illustrates how low the ACLU has fallen. Voting illegally–that’s a “civil right!” But how about not having your vote canceled by the ballot of an illegal voter? Is that a civil right? Naahh.At the same time, Eric Holder has announced that the…

Rahm Emanuel Needs to Back Off
Kevin Drum, Mother Jones
Glenn Greenwald is appalled that Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Boston mayor Thomas Menino are trying to block Chick-fil-A from opening stores in their cities because the company's CEO opposes gay marriage:”If you support what Emanuel is doing here, then you should be equally supportive of a Mayor in Texas or a Governor in Idaho who blocks businesses from opening if they are run by those who support same-sex marriage — or who oppose American wars, or who support reproductive rights, or who favor single-payer health care, or which donates to LGBT groups and Planned…

Obama Can’t Even Give Away His Big Gov’t Product
Kyle Smith, Forbes
If Bill Clinton threw six feet of dirt on the love of bureaucracy when he declared “the era of big government is over” in his 1996 State of the Union speech, President Obama is a grave-robber, a Dr. Frankenstein determined to jolt some life back into the corpse. In a way he has succeeded: Federal spending has jumped from 20 percent to 24 percent of GDP on his watch. And yet concurrent with that, there has been a mass revulsion toward the lumbering monster Dr. Obama is telling us we should regard as our benevolent friend.

What the Olympics Tell Us About Romney
Lisa Roche, Deseret News
SALT LAKE CITY — Utahns who remember Mitt Romney as the leader who turned around the troubled 2002 Winter Games might not recognize the Mitt Romney running for president.But with his appearance at the 2012 Summer Games in London this week, voter attention is likely to shift to Romney's time as Utah's Olympic leader and what it says about how he'd run the country if he's elected in November.

We Did “Build That,” and Government Helped
Jonathan Alter, Bloomberg
The flap over President Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” gaffe — playing endlessly in TV ads and sure to be a major theme of the Republican National Convention in late August — is at once sillier and more significant than it seems.It’s sillier because fair-minded observers — including neutral fact-checking referees — agree that the president’s words are shamelessly being taken out of context. For Romney to base so much of his campaign on bogus editing is lame.

10 Reasons America Might Be Nuts
John Cassidy, The New Yorker
“Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it.”That was my colleague Adam Gopnik commenting the other day on America’s attitude toward gun laws. Having read some of the comments on my own post about President Obama’s failure to pursue more restrictions on the sale of firearms, I can only agree with Adam. When Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Mayor Bloomberg, and Rupert Murdoch are all in favor of something—in this case, tougher…

Syria Is Iraq
Thomas Friedman, New York Times
Lord knows I am rooting for the opposition forces in Syria to quickly prevail on their own and turn out to be as democratically inclined as we hope. But the chances of this best-of-all-possible outcomes is low. That's because Syria is a lot like Iraq. Indeed, Syria is Iraq's twin "” a multisectarian, minority-ruled dictatorship that was held together by an iron fist under Baathist ideology. And, for me, the lesson of Iraq is quite simple: You can't go from Saddam to Switzerland without getting stuck in Hobbes "” a war of all against all…

Why 2012 Campaign Is Nothing Like 2004
William Galston, New Republic
The emerging conventional wisdom among many Democrats takes the form of two equations: 2012 = 2004, and Bain = Swift Boats. There’s also a supporting narrative: The negative campaign against John Kerry fatally weakened his candidacy, securing the victory of an incumbent who could not have won based on his own record. And so, the idea goes, a president whose performance the public doesn’t much like can power his way to a narrow, less than pretty win by eviscerating his challenger.But the evidence in favor of all of these propositions is remarkably thin. The basic structure…

Why Not Uncle Ben’s Crazy Housing Sale?
Ezra Klein, Washington Post
There’s no mystery as to why Congress is not doing more to help the economy: Disagreements between Republicans and Democrats have paralyzed the institution. In February 2011, congressional gridlock almost shut down the federal government. In August 2011, it almost caused a global financial crisis by breaching the debt ceiling. Markets are beginning to worry — rightly — that congressional paralysis might push the economy over the fiscal cliff in January 2013. At this point, the best we can hope for with Congress is that it will manage not to make things much, much…

On Syria, Mitt Offers Criticism But Few Distinctions
Scott Conroy, RCP
For months, Mitt Romney has characterized President Obama's response to the uprising in Syria as feckless and naïve.Although he has stopped short of supporting the airstrikes that Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham have advocated, in an interview Monday on CNBC, Romney portrayed the president's handling of Syria as emblematic of Obama's overall failure to project strength in the Middle East."America should've come out very aggressively from the very beginning and said Assad must go," Romney said.Obama has been publicly calling for the…

What Romney’s Returns Won’t Tell Us
Richard Cohen, Washington Post
To paraphrase Rhett Butler, I don't give a damn if Mitt Romney releases more of his tax returns. I expect to learn nothing from them, aside from the fact that he is very rich and has paid less in taxes than he has acknowledged. He has probably taken advantage of all the loops and dodges in the tax code, piling trusts on top of trusts, securing wealth for Romneys yet unborn — gelt unto the third generation, little taxed, slightly taxed or taxed not at all. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. S'cuse me, Scotty, let me tell you about…

What Still Shocks Me About ObamaCare
Nat Hentoff, Cato Institute
Amid the huge response — both triumphant and agonized — to the Supreme Court’s preservation of Obamacare, I was surprised at how little attention was being paid to that law’s core purpose: to strongly control health care costs where government funding is involved, as it increasingly will be.What still shocks me about this law is the government’s interference with the doctor-patient relationship. Many government bureaucracies will not pay for doctor-prescribed treatments costing more than a predetermined figure. And none of these…

The Politics of Anything Goes
Thomas Edsall, New York Times
Barack Obama first captured the national spotlight with a speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston in which he called for an end to the politics of division. The audience roared back its applause at the end of almost every line:Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and…

Obama’s Responsible Call for Tax Increases

From Bad to Worse for President Obama
Joseph Curl, Washington Times
At the end of last week, a liberal guest on a radio talk show declared that not much was going on in the presidential campaign — not much save for Mitt Romney’s tenure with Bain Capital and whether he would release 20 years worth of tax returns, as demanded by Team Obama.But that’s the problem with those liberal goggles: When you put them on, you just can’t see the forest for the trees. A lot happened last week — and none of it was good for President Obama.

Promising Lives Cut Down as They Began

The Medicaid Albatross
Robert Samuelson, Washington Post
WASHINGTON — It's no secret that the states are in as much budget trouble as the federal government. Doubters should read a new report from a group headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and former New York Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch. By this account, states face four insistent forces: pension underfunding of at least $1 trillion; rapidly rising Medicaid spending; possible cuts in federal aid that provides $1 in $3 of state spending; and weak growth of tax revenues that, in 2011, remained 7 percent below their pre-recession peak.What looms are higher state taxes and…

The Trap of the “New Normal”
Joel Kotkin, New Geography
This year’s presidential election is fast becoming an ode to diminished expectations. Neither candidate is advancing a reasonable refutation of the conventional wisdom that America is in the grips of a “new normal” “” an era of low growth, persistently high unemployment and less upward mobility, particularly for the working class.Certainly recent economic news of slowing growth and job creation bolster the pessimists’ case. But Americans may face far better prospects than portrayed by our dueling presidential mediocrities. Let’s…

World Braces for Fallout from Syria

Financial Scandal Scorecard
Joe Nocera, New York Times
First up: Peregrine Financial Group. This long-running fraud, which has apparently been going on almost as long as the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, came to light when the firm's founder and longtime chief executive, Russell Wasendorf Sr., tried to commit suicide a few weeks ago. (He failed.) Helpfully, he left a lengthy note that laid out what he had done. Peregrine, you see, is a commodities broker, and Wasendorf had been stealing the money that customers had on deposit with the firm. As you'll no doubt recall from the very similar MF Global scandal, where $1.6 billion in…

Movie Theater Rampage Jolts Nation
Bustillo & Banjo, Wall Street Journal
A gunman wearing a gas mask and sheathed head-to-toe in body armor opened fire in a theater packed for a midnight showing of a just-released Batman movie, killing at least 12 people and wounding 58 others.Police in this suburb just east of Denver quickly arrested the alleged shooter, James E. Holmes, a 24-year-old graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Colorado Denver with no known criminal history other than a speeding violation. 

Romney Goes From Victim to Vicious
Charles Blow, New York Times
Presidential campaigns are protracted affairs that require candidates to deftly manage the seesaws of hopes and fears, enthusiasm and foreboding, aggression and equanimity, momentum and wanderings.Not only has the Romney campaign not been on top of this lately, it has been crushed beneath the boards.

Romney Can’t Wait Out His Tax Storm
Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Mitt Romney's taxes, tax avoidance, and tax returns have become one of the central issues of this campaign. A growing chorus of Republicans, among them Ron Paul, Rick Perry, and the editors of National Review, have called on Mitt to release more returns. Would that be smart politics? Or can he wait out this storm?Is there any major Republican, from George Will to Bill Kristol to Haley Barbour, who has not called for Romney to release more returns? Surely Romney himself is asking for more than two years of returns from the veep prospects he’s vetting. What Mitt doesn’t…

Looking for a Syrian Endgame
David Ignatius, Washington Post
WASHINGTON — As Syria veers toward a violent political transition, U.S. officials are hoping to avoid a dangerous vacuum like the one that followed the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq that triggered a sectarian civil war.President Obama is seeking a “managed transition” in Syria with the twin goals of removing President Bashar al-Assad as soon as possible, and doing so without the evaporation of the authority of the Syrian state.

The Assad Regime Is Finished
Steve Coll, The New Yorker
On Wednesday, an apparent suicide bomber in Damascus attacked a meeting of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s war cabinet, killing Daoud Rajha, Syria’s defense minister, and Asef Shawkat, who was the President’s brother-in-law. The attack was the most striking in a series of signs that Syria’s uprising has tipped into a full-blown civil war, as the Red Cross has now labelled it, with the war’s momentum now favoring the rebels. (The intelligence and access required for an attack to succeed against a crisis-cabinet meeting suggests that the…

Persecuting Our Bin Laden Informant

William Raspberry’s Civility and Principle

Pervert Weiner Not Fit to Hold Office
Michael Goodwin, New York Post
The advice gives itself: The mayoral field is weak and fractured. There's a clamor for another choice. You've paid for your sins and you've got a $4.5 million campaign stash. Go for it.On one level, the whispering in Anthony Weiner’s ear, which probably carries the sound of his own voice, makes perfect sense. He was once the Democratic mayoral front-runner, and could be again.

Lowdown on Obama’s “Highbrow” Aspirations
Carl Cannon, RCP
“Of course the president wants to have a highbrow debate about these policy issues and what the American people actually care about.”"“ Obama-Biden campaign spokeswoman Jen PsakiJen Psaki made that assertion aboard Air Force One to journalists whose natural skepticism was heightened by the fact that another Obama campaign official, Stephanie Cutter, had called Mitt Romney a perjurer and a criminal a few days earlier.To be completely fair, Psaki's fellow sophisticate actually said the GOP presidential nominee was a liar or a felon — not both. Still, this is…

Obama: Your Success Belongs to the State

The Biggest Mistake of Campaign 2012
John Podhoretz, Commentary
The biggest mistake of campaign 2012 is not Mitt Romney's handling of Bain Capital, or anything Mitt Romney has done. The biggest mistake was the one made by Barack Obama on Friday, when what you might call his now-familiar "Declaration of Interdependence" went completely off the rails. Obama's "we're all in this together" bit has been a feature of his speeches during the past year, as he cites the government-led activities that have made this country better"”land-grant colleges and infrastructure and the social safety…

Obama Stresses Story Over Policy in Re-Election
Alexis Simendinger, RCP
Michelle Obama put out the word Monday that President Obama will celebrate his 51st birthday next month with donor friends at their house in Chicago, including a few small-dollar contributors who will be flown in as winners of yet another campaign raffle.Last year at a dazzling Chicago extravaganza to celebrate his mid-century mark, the president raised funds from well-wishers at events small and large held in the sweltering Aragon Entertainment Center. Jennifer Hudson and Herbie Hancock supplied the music for an energized evening organized around a re-election race that still seemed…

Romney’s Veep Trap
Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
Not that Mitt Romney doesn't have other problems right now, but think about this one. He's on the verge, they say, of picking a running mate. He needs a person who will reassure the right wing in a big way, arguably even more so now that he's having to apologize for capitalism. And yet at the same he needs to orchestrate a convention that will send the signal to middle America that they shouldn't worry, the right wing hasn't taken this party over just yet. It's a pickle, and it's one he put himself in. Why? Most nominees put their stamp on their party, but…

Storytelling the Secret Weapon of ’12
Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post
If we can all take a break from the breathless back-and-forth about Bain-gate for a moment — and if you can't, maybe later you can retroactively take a break — there was a more meaningful exchange that came out of President Obama's interview with Charlie Rose that aired on CBS Sunday and Monday morning.The president used many of his oft-repeated lines, saying that “this campaign is still about hope… it's still about change,” and that he “underestimated the degree to which in this town politics trumps problem-solving.” But it got really interesting when…

Obama Throws Economic Recovery Under the Bus
Liz Peek, Fiscal Times
President Obama will stop at nothing to win four more years in the White House "“ including cracking this fragile egg shell of a recovery and sending the U.S. into recession. With every sign that the economy is slowing, our Campaigner in Chief is creating even more anxiety by taking an unwavering stand — he will not, he affirms proudly, extend current tax rates on all Americans. Instead, he demands the wealthy pay more. That's it. That's his grand plan for getting the country moving again. A more harmful and negative campaign has surely never been waged.Nearly…